181 



HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 57 

Editors: 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 

Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Lrrr.D.,^ 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A e 



A complete classified list of the volumes of The 
Home University Library already published will 
be found at the back of this book. 



NAPOLEON 



BY 

HERBERT FISHER 

M.A., F.B.A. 
VICE-CHANCELLOR OF SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY 

AUTHOR OF "THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION IN EUROPE 
"BONAPARTISM/'' "STUDIES IN NAPOLEONIC 
STATESMANSHIP," " THE MEDIEVAL 
EMFIRE," ETCo 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 

WILLIAMS AND N ORG ATE 



d< T^ 



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©OPYRIGHT, 1913, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



S S 

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CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I Youth 7 

II The Italian Command 28 

III Egypt and Sybia 55 

IV The Organisation of France 73 

V The Prelude of Empire 97 

VI The Conquests of Empire . . . . . . . 119 

VII The Qualities of Empire 153 

VIII The First Check 168 

IX The Downfall 189 

X The Last Phase 217 

Appendix I. — Some Maxims of Napoleon . . 248 

Appendix II. — Genealogy of the Bonaparte 

Family 250 

Maps 37, 183, 225 

Bibliography 252 

Index 253 



-r 



NAPOLEON 

CHAPTER I 

YOUTH 

As we think of Napoleon Bonaparte what 
a world of visions and memories rises before 
the mind ! Who does not know the outward 
form of the greatest conqueror and captain 
of modern times : the small, almost dwarfish, 
figure, the rounded symmetry of the head, the 
pale olive cheek and massive brow, the nose 
and lips carved as it were from the purest 
marble of the antique world, and above all the 
deep-set eyes of lustrous grey, now flashing 
with electric fires, now veiled in impenetrable 
contemplation? The set of his figure is 
familiar too, as are the clothes in which it 
has been the delight of painters to portray 
him. We know the compact energy of his 
chest and shoulders, the flashing impetuosity 
of each gesture and movement, the white 
teeth and delicate hands, and the little cocked 
hat and long coat of grey in which he was 
used to ride to victory. Who has not seen 
him in print and picture, the gaunt young 
hero of the Republic charging with the flag 
at Areola, the Emperor kneeling before the 

7 



8 NAPOLEON 

altar of Notre Dame in the long and sumptu- 
ous robes of his coronation, the grim leader of 
a haggard cavalcade treading the deadly 
snows of a Russian winter, the cloaked figure 
upon a ship's deck with huddled shoulders 
and sunken chin and a far-off look of tragedy 
in his set and melancholy gaze? And the 
thoughts and feelings which glow into con- 
sciousness at the sound of this illustrious 
name are every whit as varied and chequered 
as the outward events of his life seen through 
the imagination of the painter. Perhaps in 
the whole range of history no one has aroused 
emotions so opposite and so intense, or within 
his own lifetime has claimed so much of the 
admiration, the fear, and the hatred of man- 
kind. Even the colder critics of posterity 
view his course not only with mixed and 
blended judgments, but with a kind of 
bewilderment at the union in one life and 
character of so much grandeur and roguery, 
gold and alloy. For those to whom psycho- 
logical analysis is wearisome he stands simply 
as the miraculous man of action, who without 
assistance of wealth or station mounted to the 
highest pinnacle of human fortune, supplying 
by the weight of one transcendent example 
a conclusive answer to the theory that the 
art and mystery of politics is an esoteric 
thing, a perquisite of pedigrees and privilege. 
The man of whom Madame de Stael said, 
that "of all the inheritance of his terrible 
power there remained only to the human race 
the deadly knowledge of some further secrets 



YOUTH 9 

in the art of tyranny," is also the child of the 
Revolution, the most dazzling proof of his 
own democratic doctrine that in every society 
a career should be open to talent. And so 
long as men go to the past for the pathos and 
romance of great vicissitudes of fortune, or for 
the serious interest of feats of statesmanship, 
or for documents of human power and resolve, 
or for the more elusive secrets of the passion- 
ate temperament, or else that they may win 
an insight into the human forces which move 
the world, they will continue to study the life 
of Napoleon, and to find in it at the very 
least a story as wonderful as those of the 
giants and fairies, and at the most the great- 
est explosion of human energy which in mod- 
ern times has altered the politics of civilised 
man. 

He was born at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769, 
the second son of Charles-Marie Bonaparte 
and Marie-Letizia Ramolino. His paternal 
stem drew its root from Florence (branches 
of it have been traced at Sarzana and San 
Miniato in Tuscany), but ever since 1529 the 
ancestors of Napoleon had been settled in 
Corsica. Here in this lovely scene of rugged 
mountains and dark chestnut forests and 
azure spaces of sky and sea the Bonapartes 
flourished in the esteem of their simple 
neighbours. Proud of its patrician origin, the 
family, though far from wealthy, was by the 
standard of that rude and primitive society 
reckoned to be the most prosperous in 
Ajaccio. Five Bonapartes served at differ- 



10 NAPOLEON 

ent times on the island council. But the 
evidence of ancestral ability is stronger on 
the maternal than on the father's side. The 
father of Napoleon was handsome, intelligent, 
with a not uncommon Italian turn for poetry 
and rhetoric, but extravagant and restless, 
constantly embarrassed for money, and 
driven to every kind of ingenious solicitation 
and shift to obtain it. His mother Letizia was 
a woman in a thousand. Far into old age she 
retained the beauty of face and dignity of 
carriage which were hers by right of nature, 
and which would have won her admiration 
in any company in the world. Her mind was 
plain and unfurnished. To the end of her life 
she could neither pronounce nor speak the 
French language without ridiculous mistakes, 
and her economies were carried to the point 
of avarice; but her character was solid as a 
rock of granite, and as she had faced adversity 
with courage, so she was neither changed nor 
spoiled by the marvellous revolution in her 
fortunes. In 1793 Paoli addressed her as 
Cornelia, meaning that this shrewd, resolute 
and beautiful country-woman was fit to bear 
a progeny of heroes. 

In the middle of the eighteenth century it 
was a title of honour to be a native of Corsica. 
Every lover of liberty had followed with 
sympathy the gallant struggle which the 
inhabitants of that small and freedom-loving 
island had waged, first against the odious 
rule of Genoa, and then against the powerful 
monarchy of France. The name of Pasquale 



YOUTH 11 

Paoli, the hero of the War of Independence, 
the leader and law-giver of his people, was 
famous in every capital in Europe, and the 
characteristics of a country so remote, and 
apparently by reason of that remoteness re- 
taining the large and simple heroism of clas- 
sical times, was matter for the curiosity of 
travellers and politicians. Europe thought of 
Corsica then, as she has thought since of 
Greece struggling against the Turk, or of the 
Boer Republics of South Africa as they con- 
tested the collected might of the British Em- 
pire. And the youth of Napoleon, born in the 
very year in which Corsica finally passed 
under the dominion of France, was filled 
with the reverberation of that island epic. 
Stories of the strokes and hazards of the patri- 
otic war must have been everywhere around 
him. He learned to know how his father had 
drafted a proclamation to the Corsican 
people, and how just before his birth his 
mother was driven out into the woods and 
mountains to share the perils of the patriot 
army. The star of his youth was Paoli. His 
dream was, now to write the history of his 
island, now to effect its liberation from the 
French. 

/The Corsican bore a character for sobriety, 
courage and hardihood. Hate was for him a 
virtue, vengeance a duty, pardon an infamy. 
He felt the call of the clan like a Highlander, 
an Albanian, or a Zulu, and was full of the 
pride and self-assurance common to gallant 
men who have never met a superior./ Vigilant 



12 NAPOLEON 

and astute in his judgment of character, he 
was a master of dissimulation save where 
passion broke in and spoiled the reckoning. 
His standard of honour forbade theft, en- 
joined hospitality and tolerated woman as the 
drudge of the household and the field. In 
general his deportment was noted as grave 
and stoical. He was sparing of amusement, 
would sit at cards without a word and suffer 
torture without a cry; but when the seal of 
silence was once broken, language would 
stream from him like a torrent, an index of 
that uneasy, impatient, quarrelsome energy 
which was a common attribute of the race. In 
these and other particulars of temperament 
Napoleon Bonaparte was a true Corsican. I 
The main part of Napoleon's education 
was conducted not in Corsica but in France. 
For seven years and nine months he never set 
eyes upon his home or upon his mother. 
When he left Ajaccio on December 15, 1778, 
to embark on the study of the French lan- 
guage at Autun, he was a child of nine, when 
he returned upon leave in September 1786 he 
was seventeen years old and a sub-lieutenant 
in a regiment of artillery. Yet absence had 
rather quickened than dimmed the fervour of 
his patriotism. As a schoolboy at Brienne, 
and again at the military school in Paris, he 
felt himself an exile in an enemy's country, 
using a foreign tongue and compelled to as- 
sociate with boys who despised him for his 
alien accent, his lean purse, and his lack of 
influential connections. The sense of isola- 



YOUTH 13 

tion drove him inwards on himself. As a little 
child he had been quarrelsome and turbulent; 
he was now taciturn, morose, unpopular with 
his fellows, "dry as parchment," in his own 
words, but secretly tormented by the flames 
of ambition. Linguistic capacity he never 
possessed, but from childhood he had shown 
an aptitude and taste for mathematics which 
was further developed by his French instruc- 
tors. His father had originally designed him 
for the navy, but the project was changed, 
perhaps at the boy's desire, before the five 
years' course at Brienne was concluded, and 
it was decided that he should enter the artil- 
lery, being that branch of the profession of 
arms in which brains and industry might most 
easily balance the lack of outward advan- 
tages. He had given early proof of military 
tastes; as he trotted down to his little school 
at Ajaccio he would exchange his breakfast 
of white bread for the coarse brown rations 
of the barrack, saying that he must prepare 
to lead the life of a soldier. 

The evidence with regard to his intellectual 
and moral development at this period of life, 
though not abundant, is decisive in quality. 
His letters written from school are serious, 
lucid and practical. At fourteen he summed 
up the character of his elder brother Joseph, 
and decided that being too frivolous for the 
army, he should certainly be sent into the 
Church. At fifteen and a half, learning of the 
death of his father, he wrote with a precocious 
sense of civic service : " Our country has lost a 



14 NAPOLEON 

keen, enlightened and honest citizen. It was 
so decreed by the Supreme Being." We are 
tempted to ask whether he was ever young. 
It is clear that even as a schoolboy he viewed 
the profession of arms, not as an occasion for 
brilliant spectacles, but as that branch of 
science, complete mastery of which, only to 
be achieved by devouring industry, was the 
secret of political greatness. History and 
geography were his absorbing passions. He 
would imagine himself one of Plutarch's 
heroes, and he found his first incitement to 
ambition in that famous Discourse upon Uni- 
versal History in which Bossuet unrolls the 
succession of the Empires. 

On October 28, 1785, Napoleon left the 
military school in Paris to join the artillery 
regiment of La Fere which was quartered at 
Valence. He was then a youth of sixteen 
years, poor, friendless, destitute of any kind 
of influence likely to promote his fortunes in 
the army. His father was dead, and Mar- 
bceuf and Boucheporn, the French officials in 
Corsica who had hitherto forwarded the 
interests of the family, were dead also. His « 
mother was in great straits for money, and 
his own pay as sub-lieutenant amounted to 
seventeen-and-sixpence a week. In the nor- 
mal course of events six years would elapse 
before he became a full lieutenant, twelve 
years before he became a captain; in middle 
life he might find himself retired on half -pay 
with hardly enough to keep body and soul 
together. The grey horizon only steeled his 



YOUTH 15 

character. Frugality was his second nature, 
and with no opportunities for vulgar dissipa- 
tion he plunged the deeper into the world of 
study. "Even when I had nothing to do," 
he confessed afterwards, "I vaguely thought 
that I had no time to lose." 

There was at that time in France a body of 
prose literature more certain and magisterial 
in its direction, more seductive in its rich 
combination of hopefulness, sentiment and 
wit, and therefore more cogent in its sway 
over the generous impulses of youth, than any 
which Europe had yet known. The French 
philosophers of the eighteenth century 
preached the doctrines of reason and human- 
ity to a country swiftly rising to a conscious- 
ness that the institutions under which it lived 
were the relics of a barbarous and supersti- 
tious age. They attacked every part of the 
existing order of society, invoking the widest 
principles, asking the gravest questions, and 
exhibiting, as against the darkness and con- 
fusion of the present, the dazzling vision of a 
world governed by the simple rules of rational 
arithmetic. To this literature of humanism 
and revolt men of every type and tempera- 
ment contributed their quota: Voltaire his 
easy learning and nimble wit, Turgot his 
grave and philosophic statesmanship, Raynal 
his gift of angry declamation, Rousseau an 
incomparable facility for translating into 
musical French the confessions of a sensitive 
nature and the ideals of a logical mind. To 
an impecunious sub-lieutenant of artillery, 



16 NAPOLEON 

not wholly absorbed in the technical study of 
his craft, contact with writers such as these 
was a liberal education, and in his lonely 
garret Bonaparte devoured the writings of 
the philosophers. At seventeen he was a pas- 
sionate admirer of Rousseau and of Raynal, 
and attuned, if not to expect, at least to wel- 
come, a political revolution in France. 

During his first seven years in the army 
Napoleon enjoyed large and fruitful oppor- 
tunities for reading. His military duties were 
light, his furloughs frequent and prolonged, 
and he had that exquisite passion for acquisi- 
tion which comes once only with the first 
unfolding of intellectual power. "I have no 
resources here but work," he wrote to his 
mother in 1788. "I sleep very little since my 
illness. I go to bed at ten, I rise at four, I 
have only one meal a day, at three o'clock." 
From the philosophers he learnt to despise 
monks, to hate kings and to disbelieve in the 
doctrines of the Christian religion; but philos- 
ophy was neither his most congenial study 
nor the true formative influence in his life. 
His mind was of the positive, not of the meta- 
physical order. He revelled in facts and 
figures, analysing in detail books of history, 
geography and travel, that he might under- 
stand the political conditions of the world in 
which he lived. His early copy-books show 
how painstaking he could be in the tedious 
drudgery of accumulation. Yet the appetite 
for the concrete coexisted with spiritual sen- 
sibilities of a different order, not only with 



YOUTH 17 

those which specially belong to youth, such 
as the delighted acquiescence in vague ideas 
and indefinite emotions, but with others more 
purposive and ministerial to action. Roman- 
tic dreams of greatness, passionately im- 
agined, mingled with the striving to be literal, 
to be free from clouds and to see men and 
things through plain glass. Ossian and 
Werther touched him with a sense of the 
illimitable; Corneille and Racine by their 
finished portraits of civic greatness. In 
history he found not only an encyclopaedia of 
important facts, but "the base of the moral 
sciences, the torch of truth, the destroyer of 
prejudice." Though he practised his pen on 
essays and novelettes, his principal ambi- 
tion was to be the historian of his native land, 
to exhibit the tyranny against which she had 
heroically struggled, and of which she was 
still the reluctant victim. In 1787 he began 
to compose some Letters on Corsica, and 
later on made collections at Ajaccio for an 
elaborate history of the island. 

The Revolution which broke out in the 
spring of 1789 opened sudden and indefinite 
prospects of advancement to all the poor and 
disinherited in France. Bonaparte's thoughts 
flew to Corsica; he would help to free his 
countrymen from the odious yoke of the 
French bureaucracy. In September 1789 
he obtained a furlough, and with his elder 
brother Joseph plunged into the whirlpool 
of the Corsican revolution. He declaimed 
in the clubs, composed hot revolutionary 



18 NAPOLEON 

addresses and helped to organise a national 
guard. At Ajaccio, a town of fisher-folk, he 
was the soul of the opposition to the priests 
and aristocrats. In 1790 he succeeded, by 
means even then judged to be unscrupulous, 
in securing his election as second in command 
of a battalion of Corsican volunteers, an ap- 
pointment not held to be incompatible with 
his French commission, and giving him an 
insight into the leadership and discipline of 
irregular troops. Meanwhile his view of the 
political situation was altered by the aboli- 
tion (November 30, 1789) of crown colony 
government in Corsica, and by the recogni- 
tion of the island as a department of the new 
democratic monarchy of France. From that 
moment, though his interests were still mainly 
Corsican, his aversion for France was dimin- 
ished. The Revolutionary Assembly had 
acknowledged the merits of his countrymen, 
had permitted Paoli to return, and had ar- 
ranged for the due representation of Corsica 
in the parliamentary system to be created in 
France. But Napoleon was not destined to 
be ruler of the goatherds and shepherds of 
his native hills. As war broke out upon the 
Continent and as the government in Paris 
passed more and more under Jacobin domin- 
ion Paoli, himself a constitutional monarchist, 
who had owed much to English hospitality, 
fell under suspicion as a moderate, an Anglo- 
phile and a traitor. An expedition to Madda- 
lena, a little island off the coast of Sardinia, 
miscarried owing to a naval mutiny; but in 



YOUTH 19 

the opinion of some the failure was due to a 
lukewarmness shading into treachery on the 
part of the Dictator of Corsica. Lucien 
Bonaparte, then a fiery young democrat of 
eighteen summers, having failed to become 
Paoli's secretary, discovered that he was a 
traitor, and informed the Jacobins of Toulon 
that the national hero of Corsica was fit for 
the guillotine. The Government in Paris 
accepted without examination the idle word 
of a young incendiary, decreed (April 2, 1793) 
Paoli's arrest, and ordered the three Com- 
missioners of the Convention who were at 
Bastia to effect it. The news of this insult 
to a man who, for more than a generation, had 
been regarded as the father of his country, 
set all Corsica in flame; and surrounded by 
his faithful herdsmen the old General in his 
mountain fortress at Corte defied the French 
Government to do its worst. The island was 
upon the point of civil war, and the position 
of the Bonapartes, fatally compromised by 
the rash action of Lucien and surrounded by 
the fervent Paolists of Ajaccio, became at 
once extremely critical. 

Napoleon had by this time outgrown his 
early enthusiasm for the French Revolution. 
He had passed the summer of 1792 in Paris, 
had watched the invasion of the Tuileries on 
June 20, and the massacre of the Swiss guards 
on August 10. His sense of soldierly disci- 
pline was outraged by the spectacle of a mob 
running riot, and of a regular force hacked to 
pieces for the want of a prompt and regular 



20 NAPOLEON 

leader. "What cowards!" he exclaimed to 
his friend Bourrienne, as the crowd streamed 
into the royal palace on June 20 : "How could 
they let in this rabble? Why don't they 
sweep off four or five hundred of them with 
the cannon? The rest would scamper home 
fast enough." In the midst of the revolting 
slaughter of August 10 he went down into the 
Tuileries gardens, and with the superb phrase, 
"Man of the South, let us save this unfortu- 
nate," stayed a Marseillais at his butcher's 
work. Such scenes as these cured him of his 
last ideal illusions. He wrote home that the 
Jacobins were lunatics, that the wheel of 
State was turned by a pack of vile intriguers, 
and that the people, viewed at close quarters, 
was unworthy of the efforts expended in 
courting its favour. From the distractions 
and fever of the Terror he found a refuge in 
"the sublime science" of astronomy. 

Returning to Corsica in the autumn with 
a captain's rank, Napoleon learned that his 
family stood in the shade of Paoli's dis- 
pleasure. The uncrowned King of Corsica 
had done nothing to help, and therefore had 
done much to hinder, the candidature of 
Joseph for the French Convention. He was 
in truth a Republican of the old school, 
doubtful of these Jacobinical young Rona- 
partes, who were in league with suspected or 
declared enemies. Nevertheless Napoleon 
continued to cultivate relations with the man 
who still claimed the allegiance of the better 
part of the island. He commanded the artil- 



YOUTH 21 

lery in the unfortunate expedition to Mad- 
dalena, and when the news came to Ajaccio 
that the arrest of Paoli was decreed, he com- 
posed an address to the Convention, pro- 
testing in warm and generous terms against 
so flagrant an injustice to a great and honour <= 
able patriot. But the struggle which had 
now begun in Corsica was too fierce to be 
assuaged by a pamphlet, however vigorous. 
The Bonapartes were known to be friends of 
Salicetti, the French commissioner at Bastia, 
and were therefore counted as the foes of 
Paoli; and Lucien's crowning act of insolence, 
becoming bruited at Corte, precluded any 
chance of reconciliation. It came to an open 
and unequal war. How Napoleon was taken 
by the Paolists in the mountain village of 
Bocognano; how he escaped down the long 
valley to a place of hiding in Ajaccio, and 
thence again by sea to the north; how, soon 
after, his mother was waked up at midnight 
and with four children safely drawn from the 
angry town to the lovely olive groves of 
Milelli, and thence upon news of Paolist 
bands across the fragrant hills to the tower of 
Capitello on the gulf; how the Paolists 
wreaked their vengeance on the offending 
clan, pillaging or burning six Bonaparte 
houses, two gardens and a mill; and how, 
finally, after many escapes and wanderings, 
a boat sailed from Calvi harbour on June 10, 
1793, carrying Napoleon and his family away 
from their native shores and three days later 
landed the homeless fugitives at Toulon — all 



22 NAPOLEON 

this may be found in many books, or may be 
still learned from the lips of hillmen among 
the granite homesteads of Corsica. 

That summer marked a crisis in the destiny 
of France. The royalists were up in arms 
in the West, the Girondins in Normandy, 
Bordeaux, Marseilles. A serious revolt broke 
out in Lyons. The Allies recovered Belgium, 
drove the French from their capital frontier 
posts, Conde, Mainz, Valenciennes, and 
threatened an advance into the heart of the 
country. On August 28, 1793, Toulon, the 
great military port in the Mediterranean, 
received a British fleet and hoisted the flag of 
Louis XVII. At no time was the unity of 
France or the preservation of the republican 
government so gravely imperilled. For hon- 
est and moderate men the course of duty was 
by no means clear, for on the one side was 
a government stained by regicide and the 
excesses of martial law, on the other the 
white flag of reaction and the advancing 
insult of foreign conquest. 

Napoleon had no difficulty in making his 
election. Meanly as he thought of Paris poli- 
ticians he stood for the government of the 
day, and in an able dialogue, the Souper de 
Beaucaire, argued against the Girondins of 
Marseilles that the cause of the Mountain 
was the cause of France. Soon afterwards, 
on September 16, 1793, at the request of his 
Corsican friend Salicetti he joined the republi- 
can army before Toulon as commander of 
artillery; and it was here that his quality as 



YOUTH 23 

a soldier was first decisively shown. He saw, 
as none had seen before him, that the prob- 
lem of the siege was to dislodge the British 
fleet from the inner harbour, and that the 
key to victory was the fort L'Eguillette on 
the extreme tip of the western promontory of 
Caire. Three months of untiring energy and 
fearless courage were crowned with complete 
success. On December 19, 1793, the troops 
of the Convention entered Toulon, and the 
horrors of the siege were soon forgotten in the 
disgrace of the reprisals. To the young 
officer who had helped to procure this brilliant 
and well-timed victory the government of 
Robespierre owed a debt of gratitude. He 
was promoted to the rank of brigadier- 
general, and in the spring of 1794 dispatched 
at his own suggestion to Genoa nominally to 
negotiate for provisions, in reality to explore 
the ground with a view to hostilities. But in 
those days the life of a republican general, 
however loyal and eminent, was at the mercy 
of any random slander or base intrigue. 
Bonaparte, as the friend of the younger 
Robespierre and the emissary of the Terrorist 
government, became involved in suspicion 
after the revolution of Thermidor. Return- 
ing from Genoa with a mind stored with geo- 
graphical knowledge, he was accused of being 
the plan-maker of the fallen tyrant, deprived 
of his military rank, and on August 12, 1794, 
thrown into prison at Fort Carre, near Antibes. 
There was nothing compromising in his 
papers. He had in truth studiously avoided 



24 NAPOLEON 

over-close relations with the dead dictator. 
When Maximilien Robespierre offered him a 
military command in Paris, he wisely refused 
it, reckoning that no head could be safe in 
such a city, nor could laurels be won there 
yet. His prudence was rewarded. On Au- 
gust 20, he was released, and soon afterwards 
restored to his rank. How essential were his 
talents was proved on September 21 at Dego, 
when an Austrian force attempting to cut 
the French communications with Genoa was 
routed, largely owing to the skilful disposi- 
tions of the general of artillery. 

His heart thenceforward was set upon the 
Italian command. He knew the ground and 
had thought out a plan by which a vigorous 
offensive in Italy might shatter the left wing 
of the continental coalition. But the Govern- 
ment cried a halt on the Riviera, and then 
summoned Napoleon to join the Army of the 
West as an infantry brigadier. Here he 
would be engaged as an officer in an arm not 
his own, in a civil war at once desperate and 
inglorious, against irregular bands of royalist 
nobles and peasantry. Pie came to Paris and 
boldly refused to go, under pretext of illness 
and reckoning upon the favour of B arras and 
Ereron, leaders of the dominant party who 
had seen and duly appreciated his work out- 
side Toulon. For a time success crowned his 
resolution. He was consulted by the military 
committee of the Government, and drew up a 
new plan of campaign in Italy which was 
accepted and forwarded to the front. Then, 



YOUTH 25 

by the retirement of Doulcet Pontecoulant, 
his patron and friend in official quarters, he 
was left unsheltered. The War Office awoke 
to his contumacy, and on September 15, 1795, 
just as he was expecting to be dispatched to 
Constantinople to organise the artillery of 
the Sultan, removed his name from the list 
of generals. 

At this crisis of his fortunes Napoleon was 
saved by the lucky accident of an insurrection 
in Paris. The Convention, odious on many 
just accounts not only to the whole royalist 
connection, but to all men of moderate 
opinions, had excited a storm of indignation 
by decreeing that two-thirds of its members 
were to sit in the Legislative Assembly estab- 
lished under the new Directoral Constitution. 
Plain men argued that such a provision ex- 
hibited the hollowness of arrangements pro- 
fessedly contrived to conclude the Terror 
and to give to France an orderly and respect- 
able government. What, they asked, was the 
use of the new constitution, with its Directory 
of Five, its Council of Ancients, its Council 
of Five Hundred, its wise and reassuring 
precautions against mob rule, if the ship of 
State was still to be steered by the old gang 
who had endured the September massacres, 
killed the King and the Queen, turned Paris 
into a slaughter-house, and given a recent 
exhibition of its clemency by doing the 
Dauphin to death in the Temple prison? 
The National Guard, some 30,000 strong, 
determined to wreak vengeance upon the 



26 NAPOLEON 

body which had passed the odious "Law of 
the Two Thirds " ; and as the Convention had 
but 5000 troops under its control, the situa- 
tion of the Government was gravely imperilled. 
From this almost desperate position the 
Convention was saved on the afternoon of 
October 5, 1795, by the guns of General 
Bonaparte. He had obtained an appoint- 
ment through the friendship and esteem of 
Barras, who on the previous evening had been 
placed in command of the Paris troops, and 
since Barras was no soldier, the brunt of the 
defence was borne by Napoleon. "His activ- 
ity," says Thiebault, "was astonishing: he 
seemed to be everywhere at once; he sur- 
prised people by his laconic, clear and prompt 
orders; everybody was struck by the vigour 
of his arrangements, and passed from admira- 
tion to confidence and from confidence to 
enthusiasm." In street-fighting success de- 
pends upon artillery, and when Murat gal- 
loped in with the guns from the Place des 
Sablons the victory of the Convention was 
half secured. As the heads of the insurgents 
marched from the Church of St. Roch upon 
the Tuileries they were shot away by a well- 
directed cannonade; and after a brief struggle, 
and only at the cost of some 200 lives, the 
day was won. Had the issue been otherwise, 
we cannot doubt but that France would have 
been overwhelmed by a fresh wave of anarchy 
and civil war. However tarnished its creden- 
tials, however discreditable its most recent 
phase of policy, the Convention was at least 



YOUTH 27 

as honest in purpose as many of its assailants, 
and more truly representative of the substan- 
tial interests of France. It stood at least for 
three things, all of which would have been 
endangered by its overthrow in Vende- 
miaire; for the revolutionary settlement, for 
the unity of the nation, and for the defence 
of the frontiers against foreign arms. Napo- 
leon was rewarded by the command of the 
Army of the Interior. In saving the Con- 
vention he had preserved for France not only 
a social order grounded on equality, but a 
regicide government committed to war. 

In the first flush of his triumph Bonaparte 
met and was conquered by a woman. Among 
the friends of B arras and Tallien was the 
widow of a certain Marquis Alexandre de 
Beauharnais, a general in the army of the 
Republic, who, like many a man as innocent 
and loyal as himself, had suffered by the 
guillotine during the dark days of the Terror. 
Josephine Beauharnais was born in Marti- 
nique in 1763, and was gifted with all the 
subtle charm and seduction of the South. 
Her voice was low and rich, her features re- 
fined, her expression gentle, her lightest move- 
ments easy and graceful. Her social tact was 
as perfect as her figure. Great as were the 
limitations of her intellect and schooling, she 
knew how to conceal them, and the most 
fastidious critics of the Salon found nothing 
to censure in a creature so distinguished and 
yet so unconstrained. The young general, 
whose sallow face, low stature and awkward 



£8 NAPOLEON 

bearing did not at once commend him to 
ladies, fell violently in love with this aristo- 
cratic widow, six years his senior. That she 
was poor and the mother of two children did 
not deter him; and indeed from the worldly 
point of view (if calculation was mixed with 
the heat of passion) these advantages were 
outweighed by her special friendship with the 
influential B arras. As for Josephine, being 
of a cooler metal, she lost neither heart nor 
head. But the courage, the confidence, the 
wide grasp of intellect, the half-terrifying 
glitter of that searching glance and the por- 
tentous vehemence of that ardent suit sub- 
dued her will, and how could she fail to 
understand that some brilliant destiny was 
reserved for Napoleon? They were married 
on March 9, 1798. Two days before, on the 
motion of Carnot, Napoleon was appointed 
to the Italian command. The great genius 
who had organised the victories of the Revo- 
lution had discerned the merits of the plan of 
campaign which had been submitted to the 
military committee in the summer of the 
previous year, and wisely decided to entrust 
General Bonaparte with the task of execut- 
ing his own design. 

CHAPTER XI 

THE ITALIAN COMMAND 

The war between the French Revolution 
and the dynasts of Europe had now run for 
close upon four years. After an opening 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 29 

sullied by cowardice, mutiny and crime, the 
French armies had astonished the world by 
their enterprise and valour. They had con- 
quered Belgium and Holland, Savoy and 
Nice, and more than once raided into Ger- 
many, achieving under the tricolour triumphs 
consistently pursued but never realised under 
the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy. 
So high was now the measure of French pride 
that the recovery of the frontiers of ancient 
Gaul, which stretched to the Rhine and the 
Alps, was a point of diplomatic honour with- 
out which no prospect of peace would receive 
a moment's consideration. And this ambi- 
tion was served not only by the inherited skill 
and equipment of the best army in Europe, 
but by the enthusiasm of a nation newly born 
to liberty. The old monarchies, thrifty of 
mercenary blood, found themselves con- 
fronted by a power which was prepared to 
spend ten thousand lives a week. Such lav- 
ishness was astounding even to those who 
remembered the hard blows of Frederick the 
Great. The coalition of autocrats, never 
firmly soldered, began to dissolve as the diffi- 
culties of their enterprise accumulated. In 
1795 Prussia withdrew from the war, carrying 
with her into the camp of neutrals all North- 
ern Germany; and her example was followed 
by Spain. Russia stood hostile but motion- 
less, for her soldiers were busy in Poland and 
the life was ebbing from her great Tsarina. 

Of the powers which still remained at war 
with France, Austria and England were alone 



30 NAPOLEON 

important. The continuance of hostilities 
on the Continent hinged upon the goodwill 
of Austria, and since the Revolution had 
demoralised the marine service of France, 
Great Britain was in a position to capture the 
French colonies, to waylay the French mer- 
chantmen and to land troops at any point in 
the French dominions. To obtain from 
either of these powers a formal acknowledg- 
ment of her new claims was clearly for France 
a task of immense difficulty. The recognition 
of the doctrine of natural frontiers meant the 
transference to France of Belgium, with its 
grand waterway of the Scheldt, which the 
jealousy of Holland and England had closed 
to navigation, and its superb port of Antwerp, 
which under a powerful government might 
wrest the commercial supremacy from Lon- 
don. Austria would never consent to cede her 
Belgic provinces to France without compen- 
sation, and England was prepared to fight for 
twenty years rather than see the tricolour 
wave over Antwerp. But the point of Bel- 
gium, justly regarded as vital in London, was 
not the only matter of contention between 
Francis II of Austria and the French Repub- 
lie. As the nephew of Marie Antoinette and 
the ally of the Bourbon crown, that young, 
unintelligent and obstinate prince was con- 
cerned to avenge the injuries done to his 
family and his order. As Holy Roman Em- 
peror he must protect German interests on 
the Rhine. As the ally of the little kingdom 
of Sardinia he could not suffer the robbery 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 31 

of Savoy and Nice, for the King of Sardinia 
was the sentinel posted at the western gate 
of Italy, and Italy was little better than an 
Austrian preserve. To exclude the influence 
of the French Revolution from the peninsula 
was an Austrian interest even more impor- 
tant than the preservation of Antwerp, the 
defence of the Rhine or the avenging of the 
royal victims of the guillotine. 

Napoleon knew that peace with honour 
was to be won in Italy. In a masterly note 
submitted to the younger Robespierre, in 
July 1794, he had advocated a strict defen- 
sive on the Spanish and a spirited offensive on 
the Italian frontier. And now that he was in 
command of the Army of Italy his plan was 
to strike up from the Riviera across the 
Apennines and to cut the connection between 
the Sardinian and Austrian armies, who were 
strung out across the passes north of Savona. 
Then when each of the opposing armies had 
been shaken and driven apart on diverging 
lines, he would push the Austrians out of 
Italy, and crossing the Tyrol into Bavaria, 
or striking northwards from the more easterly 
point of Trieste, join hands with the Army 
of the Rhine and dictate a peace under the 
walls of Vienna. 

The art of war is closely related to scientific 
and material progress. In the seventeenth 
century, when muskets were loaded at the 
muzzle and the field artillery was so heavy 
and unhandy that a dozen guns was an ample 
allowance for an army, and half-a-dozen 



32 NAPOLEON 

rounds a full measure for an engagement, 
battles were won by sword and push of pike. 
Such encounters were short and decisive when 
they occurred, but they occurred rarely. It 
took the best part of a day to arrange the 
pikemen and musketeers, the cannoneers and 
the cavalry, in their elaborate order of battle, 
and many hours to change the order when 
once it had been formed. No prudent general 
would divide his force or risk an encounter 
with an army superior to his own. No army, 
however superior, could force an engagement 
upon an antagonist who refused to accept 
one. It was possible for skilful commanders 
to miss one another for weeks and to manoeu- 
vre without a general action for the best part 
of a year. 

In the course of the eighteenth century 
the military art was revolutionised by a series 
of improvements in firearms. By 1720 the 
musket of the foot-soldier was so perfected as 
to be able to fire more than one shot a minute. 
Then came a light serviceable field-gun, then 
horse artillery, finally in 1765 the invention 
by Gribeauval, an officer in the army of 
Louis XVI, of a field artillery combining the 
maximum of effectiveness with the mini- 
mum of weight. The result of all these 
changes was not only to give to the artillery 
arm a new importance in warfare and to make 
it for the first time an essential factor in 
infantry operations, but to transform the 
whole science of strategy. Armies could 
now break themselves up into divisions, 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 33 

since a division, given favourable ground, 
could defend itself against a superior force, or 
at least fight its way into safety by a series 
of rearguard actions; and so it became the 
central problem of strategy to consider how 
this new power of acting on a wide front with 
an elastic force could best be used. By slow 
and reluctant stages the undivided army and 
the stiff old battle array became things of 
the past. Generals gradually learnt to throw 
out detachments and clouds of skirmishers, 
and to manoeuvre their divisions into action 
from widely distant points on the map. The 
larger the combination, the more necessary 
an exact knowledge of roads and gradients. 
A campaign might be won by map and com- 
pass, a battle decided by the charge of a 
column upon a force shaken and demoralised 
by an effective concentration of artillery fire. 
The principles of strategy adjusted to these 
changes had been fully realised and clearly 
stated by the French military writers of the 
ancien regime before any full illustration 
had been afforded of their practical working. 
They knew the value of offensive tactics, 
of the rapid concentration of divisions before 
a battle, of the cannonade as a preparation 
for the charge in column. They saw how 
horse artillery enabled rearguard actions to 
be successfully fought. They recommended 
an extreme mobility only to be purchased 
by the sacrifice of convoys and by ruthless 
requisitions from the country-side. The 
grand jorinciples of military success, that the 



34 NAPOLEON 

enemy must be ceaselessly harassed, that he 
must be manoeuvred out of strong positions, 
that he must be surprised by night marches, 
and confounded by concentrated attacks 
upon the weakest part of his line — all this 
was familiar to every student of Guibert and 
Gribeauval, of Bourcet and Du Teil. The 
new strategy was well known to Bonaparte. 
It is his glory to have applied it and to have 
exhibited its power. 

The French army does not owe to Napoleon 
any military patents but that of victory. He 
invented nothing, neither a new gun, nor a 
new formation, nor new principles of attack 
and defence. He accepted what he found 
ready to his hand — the armament, the drill 
book, the tactics and strategy of the old 
royal army of France in which he had served 
his apprenticeship. His tactical preference 
was for the ordre mixte, recommended by 
Guibert as combining the wide frontal fire 
of the line with the solid striking force of the 
column, but this alternation of battalions in 
line and battalions in column was not in- 
variably adopted, and was often confined to 
those portions of the field where Napoleon 
wished to contain the enemy, while at the 
decisive point the attack was entrusted to 
great masses of men charging in undeployed 
column. In the main, however, minor tacti- 
cal dispositions were left to subordinates. 
Napoleon's concern was with "grand tactics," 
with the movement of divisions on to the 
field, with the selection of the crucial point 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 35 

to be assailed, and with the concentration 
of artillery fire upon it. Here he was rarely 
at fault, but the system of the column, 
inherited from the armies of the French 
Revolution, depended for its success upon the 
unsteadiness of the troops opposed to it. 
When the opposing army was already de- 
moralised either by the guns or the skirmish- 
ing line of its adversary the shock tactics 
of the column were irresistible: but against 
a long line of cool and collected marksmen, 
screened from artillery by the lie of the land, 
the column was bound to fail. The narrow 
front of the charging mass was shot away by 
the converging fire of the extended line, and 
the battle was lost before the weight of the 
column could be brought to bear upon its 
opponent. This is the secret of General 
Stuart's victory at Maida in 1806 and of 
Wellington's victories in the Peninsular War; 
but when Napoleon took over the Italian 
command in 1796 the superiority of the linear 
formation was not yet evident, for no army 
opposed to the French had yet exhibited the 
perfect steadiness and fire discipline neces- 
sary to its success. 

The army of France, which in the later 
days of Louis XVI was already the best in 
Europe, reached a still higher stage of 
efficiency as a consequence of the political 
convulsions of the country. Without loss of 
scientific precision, for, though many emi- 
grated, the artillerists and engineers of the 
royal army continued for the most part 



36 NAPOLEON 

to serve under the tricolour, it became 
national and democratic, patient of huge 
sacrifice, and capable of a degree of mobility 
new to the practice of war. Free promotion 
succeeded the stifling system of caste, so 
that in a few years an able man shot up from 
the ranks to high command. Human life 
was held cheap. An army was no longer 
royal capital to be saved, but national income 
to be expended. The incredible buoyancy 
of the nation communicated itself to the 
camp, and the French soldier of the Republic 
felt ready to go anywhere and dare anything 
in the most seductive cause which has ever 
been placed before a great multitude of men. 
When Napoleon took up his Italian com- 
mand, none of his generals knew him. His 
extreme youth, his haggard face and mean 
stature, and the eagerness with which he 
showed the portrait of his bride, suggested 
that his appointment was due to favouritism 
and intrigue. "But a moment afterwards," 
says Massena, "he put on his general's hat 
and seemed to have grown two feet. He 
questioned us on the position of our divisions, 
on the spirit and effective force of each corps, 
prescribed the course which we were to 
follow, announced that he would hold an 
inspection on the morrow, and on the follow- 
ing day attack the enemy." Massena, 
Berthier and Augereau were all older men, 
but the new general spoke with such calm, 
dignity and talent that everybody who heard 
him was convinced that here was a true 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 



37 




38 NAPOLEON 

captain of men. The prodigal energy of the 
new nation, already fired to a course of heroic 
adventure, was awaiting just such a leader as 
this, a man of swift resolve and iron will, a 
master of the craft of war on its technical 
side, and yet eloquent, imaginative, studious 
of popularity, capable in the few words of a 
proclamation or a bulletin of striking the 
great chords of emotion which sway the heart 
of a soldier. 

The opening of Napoleon's first Italian 
campaign is justly accounted one of the classic 
pieces of the military art. In less than twenty 
days the young General drove the Austrians 
across the Po and forced the Sardinians to 
demand an armistice. And this he accom- 
plished with twenty-four light mountain 
guns, a handful of horse, and a ragged, half- 
starving infantry slightly inferior in numbers 
to the joint power of his original adversaries, 
but so skilfully and rapidly handled that in 
every important engagement the enemy was 
greatly outnumbered. Youth was pitted 
against age, exact and detailed knowledge 
of the ground against capacious ignorance; 
and in explaining Napoleon's success it should 
also be remembered that the Army of Italy 
was already hardened in the rigorous school 
of mountain warfare. Yet the prudence of 
the young General was as remarkable as the 
grit and impetuosity of his men. When he 
had cut the centre of the enemy's power at 
Montenotte he did not pursue the Austrians 
on to /the plain of Lombardy, but turned 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 39 

eastwards upon the Piedmontese to secure 
his communications with France. He won 
victories at Mondovi and Ceva, but was not 
incited, as a lesser man might have been, 
to march upon Turin and dictate a peace 
in the Piedmontese capital. At the earliest 
moment he extorted an armistice at Cherasco 
which gave him the strict essentials which 
he needed — three fortresses and a secure 
control of the military roads through Pied- 
mont. It was part of his strength that he 
never lost sight of the broad perspective of 
the campaign, never wasted time in pro- 
ducing minor and irrelevant successes. On 
May 10, he forced the bridge of Lodi, and 
five days later rode into Milan. 

The vital point of the military operations 
that ensued was the strong city of Mantua, 
which was victualled for four months and 
garrisoned by 13,000 Austrian troops. So 
long as the Black Eagle floated over the 
great citadel on the Mincio, the French could 
neither advance northwards into the Tyrol 
nor eastwards upon Trieste, nor could they 
rely upon the quiescence of those Italian 
governments who sympathised with the old 
order of the world, and viewed the irruption 
into their ancient culture of an atheist and 
republican army as a clarion call to anarchy. 
Four times did the Austrians send armies 
into Italy to relieve the beleaguered city, and 
four times they were repulsed by Napoleon. 
And here again the numerically weaker force 
was generally so wielded as at the critical 



40 NAPOLEON 

point of place and time to outnumber its 
adversary. 

The first army of relief under Wurmsef 
was 50,000 strong. Against it Napoleon had 
42,000 men, some 10,000 of whom under 
Serurier were besieging Mantua with its 
garrison of 13,000 Austrians. Upon any 
rational calculation of chances the army of 
Wuraiser should have won the campaign; 
but the Austrians made the great mistake of 
dividing forces, Wurmser marching down the 
Adige on the eastern side of Lake Garda with 
32,000 men, and Quasdanovitch pursuing the 
western bank with 18,000. Even so the 
French army of observation was unequal to 
the task imposed upon it, and at a council 
of war held at Roverbella on July 30, 1796, 
it was decided to abandon the siege, to 
sacrifice the siege train and to throw every 
available man against the relieving army. 
Such a resolve, whether first suggested by 
Augereau or not, was quite in the spirit of 
French intrepidity and Napoleonic perspec- 
tive. The abandonment of a siege and the 
sacrifice of a siege train were losses not to be 
weighed against the humiliation of a general 
retirement or the chances of a disaster in 
the open field. Napoleon's aim was to 
defeat his enemies in detail before they had 
time to unite south of the Garda. First 
Quasdanovitch was repulsed at Lonato on 
August 3; then two days later Napoleon 
turned round on Wurmser, who had poured 
fresh troops into Mantua, beat him in the 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 41 

hotly contested fight of Castiglione, and 
thrust him back into the Tyrol with a total 
loss of some sixty guns and 10,000 men. 
Having thus brilliantly saved a desperate 
situation, the French commander awaited 
reinforcements and the news of a victory in 
Southern Germany. 

The attack was renewed in September, 
but with even less of foresight and combina- 
tion upon the Austrian side. The relieving 
army under Wurmser again divided itself 
into two, the one under Davidovitch march- 
ing through the Tyrol, the other under the 
commander-in-chief taking the westerly loop 
of the Brenta valley. On September 4, 
Davidovitch with 10,000 men was over- 
powered at Roveredo by a force exactly 
double his number under Massena, Augereau 
and Vaubois. Then Napoleon, who had cut 
into the Brenta valley between the two Aus- 
trian commanders, rushed down after Wurm- 
ser, and covering fifty-seven miles in sixty 
hours caught him at Bassano (September 8), 
dealt him a shattering blow and sent him 
reeling into Mantua. The accession of so 
large an addition to the garrison of a pesti- 
lential town was no strengthening of its 
defences, and at that season of the year 
Napoleon could afford to count on the co- 
operation of fever. Without too closely 
pressing the blockade, for the swamps of 
Mantua proved as dangerous to besiegers as 
besieged, he sent entreaty after entreaty 
to Paris for guns and reinforcements. 



42 NAPOLEON 

The six weeks which intervened between 
the repulse of the second attempt to relieve 
Mantua, and the third and most critical 
struggle of the war, are memorable in the 
history of the Italian risorgimento. The 
ragged army of the French Republic had 
been received with enthusiasm by an active 
and intelligent minority of the citizens of 
Milan, who, having been indoctrinated with 
the gospel of liberty, viewed the Catholic 
religion as effete, the Pope as an impostor? 
and the Austrian Government as an obsolete 
tyranny. Napoleon was aware that such 
sentiments were the property of that limited 
class who had received a legal, medical, or 
artistic education, and that the mass of the 
Italian population was still ignorant and 
credulous. But coming as he did to Italy 
as the chief of a republican army, and as the 
herald of republican ideas, he found it politic 
to encourage the aspirations of those Italians 
who desired to taste the fruits of liberty and 
looked to him to guide them into the land of 
promise. A wave of democratic enthusiasm 
passed over Reggio, Modena, Ferrara and 
Bologna, and was blessed by the French 
General. Without waiting for the assent 
of his masters, he committed his country 
to the recognition of a Transpadane republic 
formed out of the territories of these four 
cities and certain portions of the Papal State. 
"It is time," he wrote to the citizens of 
Reggio, "that Italy also should be counted 
among the free and powerful nations." And 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 43 

to assist the process of emancipation he called 
for guns and men, and fattened himself, his 
generals, his army and government on the 
rich spoils of the country. 

With sound military instinct he told the 
Directory that with the meagre force at his 
disposal it would be folly to embark upon 
a war with Rome or Naples. The path of 
prudence was to make peace with Naples 
and to amuse the Pope with negotiations 
until the Austrian storm-cloud had been 
dispersed. Meanwhile the liberal enthusiasm 
of the North Italian patriots would be a 
valuable force enlisted on the French side. 
And so the Directory, who had enjoined an 
invasion of South Italy and contemplated 
a peace with Austria based on the cession 
of Lombardy in exchange for Belgium, found 
that the whole political landscape was altered 
at the fiat of their General. They were now 
pledged to defend republican institutions in 
Lombardy and Emilia, and to swallow their 
resentment at the continued rule of a priest 
and a Bourbon. They learned that not a 
man could be spared from the north, since 
an Austrian force 60,000 strong was collecting 
in the Tyrol and in Trieste for another spring 
at the blockaders of Mantua. 

Indeed, the third act of the Mantuan 
drama was destined to test to their utmost 
span the resources of Napoleon's military 
genius. The new Austrian army was under 
the supreme command of Alvintzi, a veteran 
like his predecessors, but in Napoleon's 



44 NAPOLEON 

mature judgment the ablest and most obsti- 
nate of his opponents; and if the honours 
eventually rested with Napoleon, it was, on 
his own confession, because the vigour of 
youth gave him that slight but decisive 
advantage in dash and tenacity which turns 
the balance in an even fight. 

As if experience had not sufficiently dis- 
closed the perils of division, the Austrians 
for a third time advanced upon Mantua in 
two columns — Alvintzi .^om his eastern base 
in Trieste, and Davidovitch from his northern 
base in the Tyrol. In order to parry this 
attack it was Napoleon's design himself to 
march eastwards and beat Alvintzi on the 
Brenta, and then moving swiftly up the 
curving river into the Tyrol to place him- 
self on the rear of Davidovitch, whose ad- 
vance down the Adige was to be arrested 
by a French corps under Vaubois. No 
general, however brilliant, can count upon 
executing his schemes exactly as he con- 
ceives them, and the opening of the Areola 
campaign was for Napoleon a catalogue 
of disasters. Neither could Vaubois stop 
the advance of Davidovitch, nor could Auge- 
reau and Massena force the passage of the 
Brenta. Early in the morning of October 12, 
Alvintzi appeared upon the hills of Caldiero 
outside the walls of Verona. Napoleon 
marched out to dislodge him, only to find that 
against such a general posted in a strong 
position, the famous Slan of his Army of 
Italy was unavailing. After a long day's 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 45 

fight the French were repulsed all along the 
line and driven back into the city. The 
situation was critical. If Napoleon retreated 
upon Mantua the two Austrian columns 
would effect their junction. If he remained 
in Verona he might be surrounded. If he 
attempted again to assault the strong position 
of Caldiero, he would only court a second 
repulse. With an intuition of genius he 
determined to march round Alvintzi's posi- 
tion, to capture his transport and reserve 
artillery, and to fight him before Davidovitch 
had time to come up, in a position where 
superior numbers were of little account. So 
leaving 3000 men in Verona he turned his 
face down the Adige, and crossing, at Ronco 
on October 15, pushed across the triangle 
of marshy ground which divides the Adige 
and the Alpone. 

Here an unexpected obstacle confronted 
the French advance. The bridge over the 
Alpone at Areola was held by two Croatian 
battalions with inflexible tenacity. In vain 
Napoleon seized a flag, rushed to the bridge 
and tried by an example of personal courage 
to carry the passage. The Austrians poured 
in a murderous fire from the houses in the 
little village across the stream, and as man 
after man fell the General was borne back- 
wards in the retreating tide, thrust sideways 
from the dyke into the water and only with 
difficulty extricated. On the next day the 
whole of Alvintzi's army was concentrated 
round Areola, and a battle began which 



46 NAPOLEON 

swayed to and fro until the evening of the 
17th. The psychological moment which 
decides the fate of armies came in the after- 
noon of the third day, when fifty horsemen 
led by a negro of the Guides galloped round 
the rear of the Austrian position, sounding 
their trumpets and creating the impression of 
a serious attack. For a moment the ranks 
wavered, and taking advantage of the sudden 
recoil, Augereau, who commanded on the 
French right, pressed home his attack. At 
five o'clock the army which had so gallantly 
defended the paltry village of Areola slowly 
withdrew from its positions. The victory 
came not a moment too soon, for on the same 
day Vaubois was turned out of Bivoli, and the 
road to Verona was open to Davidovitch. 
Indeed, had that commander conducted him- 
self with promptitude and resolve, he might 
have helped to retrieve the defeat of Areola, 
for on October 21, the stubborn Alvintzi was 
back on the heights of Caldiero and in a 
position to give him support. Fortunately 
for Napoleon, Davidovitch was not made of 
the firmest metal, and after being driven 
from the defensible plateau of Bivoli was 
soon retreating in disorder before the fierce 
pursuit of Vaubois and Massena. 

Four months later the all-important ques- 
tion whether Mantua was to be relieved was 
put to a crowning test on the plateau of 
Rivoli. Here on January 13, Joubert found 
himself confronted with a greatly superior 
army advancing from the north under 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 47 

Alvintzi, and reported that unless speedily 
reinforced he should be compelled to evacuate 
the position. At two o'clock on the follow- 
ing morning Napoleon arrived on the ground 
from Verona. By the sparkling light of a 
wintry moon he saw the five Austrian camps, 
their fires starring the country between the 
Adige and the lake, and from the evidence 
thus supplied inferred that the battle was 
timed for ten o'clock, and that for every 
Frenchman to defend the plateau there 
would be two Austrians ready to attack it. 
But the position of Rivoli has this special 
character, that an army coming from the 
Tyrol cannot dislodge its defenders save by 
scaling the spurs which overlook the plateau, 
and cannot scale the spurs without dispensing 
with horse and artillery. In the battle 
which ensued the French, though greatly 
outnumbered, were supported by sixty guns 
and several regiments of cavalry against a 
force compelled to rely on one arm alone. 
This, coupled with the inspiring activity of 
Bonaparte and the grand night march of 
Massena with reinforcements, decided the 
day. By 2 p. m. the Austrians were beaten, 
and had the snow not lain thick upon the 
pass the pursuit of the flying enemy would 
not have stopped at Trent. Three weeks 
later the tricolour was flying over Mantua, 
and the obstacle which had so long de- 
layed Napoleon's advance was triumphantly 
removed. 

Before that advance was pushed home 



48 NAPOLEON 

Napoleon turned aside to settle his accounts 
with the Pope. Here again he refused to be 
diverted from the strict essentials of success 
either by the advice of a cabinet which 
he despised, or by the prospect of easy 
victories which could not help to decide the 
campaign. The Papal Government was un- 
friendly to the anti-clerical Republic of 
France, and pressure was put upon General 
Bonaparte to teach the priests their place in 
the economy of the republican world. Noth- 
ing would have been easier to the tried veter- 
ans of the Army of Italy than to proceed in 
triumph to Rome, and there to annihilate the 
weakest of governments. Yet the tempta- 
tion, however alluring, was one which a states- 
man and a strategist was bound to resist. 
There was no sense in gratuitously offending 
the religious susceptibilities of a Catholic 
people whose goodwill it was important for 
the French to secure; and so long as Austrian 
armies were at large, it would be an act of 
high military imprudence for the General-in- 
Chief of the French army to go to Rome. At 
the Treaty of Tolentino (February 19) 
Napoleon wrung tribute, pictures and prov- 
inces from the Pope without compromising 
his military position. * He had delayed his 
rupture with the Papacy until the fall of 
Mantua was assured, and so timed his accom- 
modation with the Pope as to be able to 
strike a fresh Austrian army collecting on the 
Tagliamento before it was reinforced. The 
economy of fleeting moments has never been 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 49 

more jealously practised, and that he might 
gain a few days for his Roman campaign, the 
task of receiving the submission of Mantua 
and the sword of the Austrian Field-Marshal 
was delegated to Serurier. 

The last phase of the war is characterised 
by a succession of French victories easily won 
against an inferior and demoralised enemy. 
While Joubert pushed his way northwards 
and eastwards by the Brenner and the 
Pustherthal, Napoleon beat the Archduke 
Charles at the Tagliamento, and crossing into 
Carinthia by the Col de Tarvis steadily drove 
forward towards the Austrian capital. On 
March 28, he was at Villach, on April 7 his 
vanguard under Massena reached the little 
town of Leoben, not a hundred miles from 
Vienna. Here overtures for peace were re- 
ceived and preliminaries signed. With the 
shrewd judgment which characterised his 
whole conduct of this campaign, Napoleon 
knew when it was wise to stop as well as 
when it was opportune to strike. A further 
advance would have been dangerous, for 
apart from the possibility of a grand imperial 
rally, he had learnt that no help was to be 
expected from the Army of the Rhine and 
that peasant risings in Venetia and Tyrol 
were likely to imperil his communications. 

Among the baits offered to Austria in the 
Preliminaries of Leoben was a share in the 
ancient and happy Republic of Venice, a 
State which had sought no quarrel with 
France and could not properly be described 



50 NAPOLEON 

as a tyranny doomed by reason. The re- 
sponsibility of making the offer rests with 
Bonaparte, that of accepting it with Thugut, 
the Austrian Prime Minister. Bonaparte's 
diplomacy was of his own choosing, and was 
neither republican nor monarchist. A peace 
of some kind with Austria he must have, and 
that soon; and the swiftest way to overcome 
the reluctance of his enemy to part with 
Belgium and Lombardy was to offer her 
Venice in exchange. The ancient fame of 
this most pleasant haunt of fashionable 
gamblers was nothing to him; its weakness, 
so far from carrying an invitation to pity, 
gave matter for contempt. He could argue 
with his conscience that he had done enough 
already for Italian liberty, and that the loss 
of Venetian freedom was not too heavy a 
price for Lombard liberty. He had no punc- 
tilio as to the procedure. It was easy to pick 
a quarrel with a Government which had not 
been strong enough to protect its neutrality 
or to suppress open manifestations of hostility 
to Jacobin principles. An insurrection at 
Verona, sternly suppressed by the French 
garrison, supplied a pretext for demanding a 
revolution at Venice. The old Government 
fell cowering to the ground ; and with engag- 
ing versatility the impressionable Venetians 
conceived a sudden enthusiasm for the tri- 
colour, the tree of liberty, the red cap and 
all the emblems of the French Revolution. It 
was but a summer's madness. When the 
first October snows touched the mountain 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 51 

spurs, Napoleon saw that it was time to 
have the treaty signed, and the Venetians 
learnt that the tree, the cap and the tricolour 
were no sovereign spells against the greatest 
calamity which can befall a State. The 
Republic was partitioned, and the hated 
two-headed eagle waved over the lagoons. 

If it is a truism to say that the act was 
cynical, it would be a shallow philosophy 
which would summarise Napoleon as a cynic. 
There is a story of three Venetian envoys 
secretly dispatched to France to bribe the 
Directors, but arrested by orders of the 
General-in-Chief and hauled back ignomin- 
iously to Milan. One of them, a Dandolo, 
but not of the famous lineage, spoke to his 
captor with such eloquence that Napoleon 
was moved to tears, and exhausted all his 
seductions in trying to prove to the man that 
the step was a temporary concession to stern 
necessity. The tears were genuine, and after 
the battle of Austerlitz the promise was 
redeemed. 

In the history of Italy the most significant 
feature of Napoleon's political settlement was 
not the betrayal of Venice, but the foundation 
of the Cisalpine Republic. Other countries 
had been betrayed, and in Poland there had 
been a recent and not more odious precedent 
of a State annihilated and a nation parti- 
tioned by the greed of its neighbours. But 
the creation of this Republic in Northern Italy 
as the daughter State of France and as the 
pupil of her Revolution, was at once a chal- 



5% NAPOLEON 

lenge to the spirit of national freedom in Italy 
and an affront to the dynasties whose exist- 
ence contravened it. Critics might allege 
that it was a composite and artificial thing 
made out of Lombardy, the Transpadane, 
and scraps of Venice and Switzerland, and 
that being diversely composed it could not 
endure. It is more important to notice that 
the boundaries of the new State were so 
drawn as to comprise the most energetic and 
progressive populations in Italy, that it was 
adorned with the established prosperity of 
Milan, with the learning and patriotic ardour 
of Bologna, and that unlike the city republics 
of old whose function and usefulness had been 
exhausted by the end of the fifteenth century, 
it was calculated not to enhance but to cor- 
rect the inveterate curse of Italian localism. 
Many a family whose members were destined 
to play an honourable part in the wars of 
Italian liberation dates the birth of its inter- 
est in the national cause to the larger hopes 
and livelier interests which were kindled by 
the foundation of the Cisalpine Republic. 

It is tempting to suppose that in so framing 
a seminary for the political education of 
Italy, Napoleon was obeying the mysterious 
call of blood. Was he not himself an Italian? 
Was he not hailed by the Italians as a com- 
patriot? Did he not speak their language 
and read their hearts? Yet, if there was 
sentiment on his side, it was no mother of 
illusion. He saw the faults of the Italian 
temperament with a merciless lucidity, and 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 53 

argued correctly that a people devoid of 
strenuous purpose and long unused to the 
handling of public affairs was not yet ripe 
for political liberty. His own deep conser- 
vative instincts were strengthened by what 
he saw of the Milanese Jacobin, and though 
he permitted his new Republic a constitu- 
tion modelled on the political liberties of 
France, he named the ministers, the judges, 
the legislators and civil servants, and in- 
formed the Government in Paris that the 
Cisalpine Republic was the creation of the 
army and would crumble to pieces if the army 
were withdrawn. For the future he trusted 
that the regime of military conscription 
would educate the Cisalpines into a due sense 
of political cohesion and responsibility. 
Meanwhile the situation was precarious. He 
knew that the peasantry hated a government 
which gave them bad paper for their good 
crops, and he assured the Directors that if 
once the French bayonets were withdrawn, 
not a "patriot" of the new regime would save 
his skin. 

In the spring and summer of 1797, while 
negotiations were still pending with Austria, 
and while liberal Italy was being inducted 
into its new Republic, Napoleon kept state 
in the splendid castle of Mombello, twelve 
miles from Milan. In all but name he was 
already a sovereign, giving audience to 
foreign ambassadors, dining in public, his 
carriage attended by a Polish bodyguard, his 
court ruled by a strict etiquette. A shower 



54 NAPOLEON 

of Italian odes and sonnets greeted the hero, 
the peacemaker, the new Hannibal, the pro- 
tagonist of humanity against despot and 
caste. Around him was gathered a brilliant 
assemblage of young officers, full of the exhil- 
arating sense of great exploits already 
achieved and fresh worlds yet to conquer, un- 
sundered as yet by jealousy and bound in the 
frank and cordial communion of arms. There, 
too, was the gay Josephine quieting the sus- 
picions of a passionate bridegroom, and with 
her were seen the three sisters of the hero, 
shepherded by their mother, that they might 
taste the strange sweets of luxury and 
triumph. Stern and imperious in business 
hours, Napoleon was all ease and sunshine to 
his intimates . They admired his pleasant wit, 
his unaffected gaiety, his rich and brilliant 
handling of moral and political themes. They 
found him kindly and not inaccessible to 
counsel, immensely laborious, but always 
able to command the precious obedience of 
sleep. There seemed no limit to the span of 
his activities and interests. Now he would 
listen with his staff to Monge discoursing of 
geometry, now in a lazy interval he would 
weave dreams and ghost stories. His confi- 
dence was boundless, his ascendancy unques- 
tioned: and walking one day in the gardens 
with Miot and Melzi he disclosed something 
of his ambition. "Do you think," he asked, 
"that 1 triumph in Italy to make the great- 
ness of the lawyers of the Directory?" 
As yet, however, in his own phrase, "the 



THE ITALIAN COMMAND 55 

pear was not ripe." Much as he despised 
the Government of France, he was not ready 
to compass its violent ruin. On the contrary, 
when in September 1797 it seemed likely that 
the royalists would capture the machine of 
state, the revolution was for the second time 
saved by Napoleon. For three good reasons 
he could not afford to see the Bourbons back 
in Paris; they would make peace with Europe, 
they would govern France, and they would 
almost certainly dispense with his services. 
The rule of a corrupt handful of regicides was 
at least better than the ancien regime, for 
men like Barras could always be bribed and 
always be put down. So when a cry came 
from Paris that the elections were reaction- 
ary, republican addresses poured in from the 
Army of Italy, and Augereau, a swashbuckler 
exactly suited to the task, was dispatched to 
overawe the capital, and to purify the as- 
semblies of their royalist politicians. The 
coup d'etat of Fructidor was brilliantly suc- 
cessful, for it silenced royalism, and estab- 
lished in France a government at once weak, 
violent and corrupt. The stars in their 
courses fought for Bonaparte. In that fatal 
autumn, Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau, his three 
most brilliant rivals, fell out of the race, the 
first dying in early manhood, the other two 
compromised in the revelations or suspicions 
of Fructidor. Bonaparte stood higher than 
ever, his reputation for republican ardour 
refreshed, the moderate wisdom of his Italian 
statecraft widely acknowledged. On October 



56 NAPOLEON 

17 he signed the Peace of Campo-Formio 
with Austria, proving himself more than a 
match for Cobentzel, than whom there was 
in Europe no finer or more experienced di- 
plomatist. The proudest monarchy in Eu- 
rope was compelled to cede Belgium and the 
Rhine frontier to France, to acknowledge 
the Cisalpine Republic, and in exchange to 
accept the shameful guerdon of Venice. The 
terms were settled by Napoleon, and France 
and Austria were compelled to swallow them 
as best they might. 



CHAPTER III 

EGYPT AND SYRIA 

Of the six original antagonists of revolu-? 
tionary France there was now through the 
operation of the Peace of Campo-Formio a 
solitary survivor. England, the last of the 
combatants to lay down arms, was also in 
the eyes of Napoleon his most formidable 
opponent, not only by reason of her wealth, 
her colonies and her marine, but also as the 
active and irrepressible fomenter of civil dis- 
cord in France. Austria had fought stub- 
bornly in the Lombard plains, but no Aus- 
trian flag had fluttered beside the Union Jack 
in Toulon harbour or in Quiberon Bay. Eng- 
land, on the other hand, was the principal 
stronghold of French royalism, the soul of the 
continental coalition and the tyrant of the 
seas. With England unsubdued the revolu- 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 57 

tionary settlement of France was in constant 
danger of disturbance. "Our Government," 
wrote Napoleon on October 18, 1797, "must 
destroy the English monarchy, or it must 
expect itself to be destroyed by these active 
islanders. Let us concentrate our energies 
on the navy and annihilate England. That 
done, Europe is at our feet." 

Certainly if England was to be "de- 
stroyed," France could not too soon attend to 
her navy. The Revolution, which had given 
a new mass and momentum to her armies, had 
exercised a deplorable influence on the marine 
forces of France. A service peculiarly de- 
pendent in almost all its branches upon the 
possession of technical skill and experience 
had been entirely demoralised by the spread 
of principles subversive of discipline and 
impatient of inequality. Serious mutinies 
broke out in the dockyards. The trained 
gunners were disbanded. Most of the com- 
petent officers, belonging as they did to well- 
born families, were forced out of the service. 
The French navy, so efficient in the American 
War, lapsed into a state of disorganisation 
from which it never recovered during Napo- 
leon's ascendancy. And it is one of the fortu- 
nate accidents of history that the greatest 
military tyranny in Europe was so weak upon 
the seas, that its permanent influence in Asia, 
Australasia, Africa and America [is summed 
up in the victory of those forces making for 
political freedom which were enlisted against 
it and were secured by its downfall. 



58 NAPOLEON 

It was almost inevitable that the conduct 
of the war against "the active islanders" 
should be entrusted to the young general 
who had crowned an unparalleled series of 
victories by a brilliant peace. Napoleon was 
appointed General of the Army of England. 
A short inspection of the Channel coast, 
undertaken in February 1798, showed him 
that an invasion was impossible without 
lengthy and meditated preparation. But 
England was never in Napoleon's eyes a mere 
island; she was a world power whose princi- 
pal strength lay in her wide commerce and 
her Indian possessions. To attack England 
with success was a feat which could be ac- 
complished in more ways than one. If the 
Channel was impassable, the Mediterranean 
was open, and a French army established in 
Egypt might create just that diversion in the 
naval forces of his opponent without which 
it would be folly to attempt the crowning 
enterprise on London. 

The project was recommended by other 
considerations. From early boyhood Napo- 
leon's imagination had been haunted by the 
charm, the brilliance, the mystery of the 
East. To the seafarers of Corsica the Tu- 
nisian coast is a familiar and neighbourly 
region. Tunis leads to Egypt; from Egypt 
the mind travels through Mecca and Teheran, 
through Arabian deserts and Persian rose- 
gardens, to the white temples on the sacred 
Ganges. As a boy Napoleon had talked of 
enlisting with the British army in India; as 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 59 

a young general he stood for a few weeks on 
the brink of a military career in Turkey. In 
the course of his Italian campaign, as victory 
after victory confirmed his confidence in 
destiny, he felt himself drawn more and more 
powerfully towards the East. He spoke of it 
frequently to his friends, and began to think 
of Italy not as an end but as a beginning — a 
convenient projection so thrown athwart the 
sea and providentially indented that from its 
good and numerous harbours it would be 
easy to master the Mediterranean and the 
lands which lay beyond. He must have a 
port looking eastwards, and he seized Ancona, 
stepping-stones on the Adriatic, and he 
claimed the Ionian Isles, the control of Genoa, 
and he created a Ligurian Republic. With 
the eye of faith he saw Greece fired to revolu- 
tion by his agents, and the Turkish Empire 
pushed by a few adroit and skilful strokes 
down its road to inevitable dissolution. 

The seizure of Egypt, should it be success- 
fully accomplished, might change the politi- 
cal weights and balances of the world. One 
possibility was that while an English fleet 
was kept hovering round Alexandria, Napo- 
leon might return to the Channel, surprise a 
passage and overthrow the British Govern- 
ment. A less decisive but not less attractive 
issue to the enterprise was that after Egypt 
had been conquered and a Suez Canal pierced 
and fortified, a French force should march 
upon India, and joining hands with the 
Mahrattas expel the English from their East- 



60 NAPOLEON 

ern dominions. Or if both these projects should 
prove impracticable, it would still be an at- 
tractive occupation for the master of Egypt 
to invade Syria, to take Constantinople, and 
to break the Ottoman Empire to pieces. 

For Napoleon at least it was a part of 
prudence to escape with as little delay as 
possible from the critical atmosphere of Paris. 
Being less than forty years of age, he was 
ineligible for a place in the Directory, and 
he was acutely conscious of the palsy which 
spreads over the most brilliant reputation if 
it is not refreshed by action and advertise- 
ment. "Bourrienne," he said to his secretary 
on January 29, 1798, "I do not wish to remain 
here; there is nothing to do. They will not 
listen to anything. Everything wears out 
here. My glory is already threadbare. This 
little Europe is too small a field. Great 
celebrity can be won only in the East." The 
example of Alexander was before his eyes. 
He imagined that beyond Europe, with its 
stiff traditions and stifling atmosphere of 
civilised prudence, there were vast and plastic 
spaces in the world — scenes of "great empires 
and great cataclysms" which he might con- 
quer and mould to his will. 

The Directors readily accepted the scheme. 
Ever since the crusade of St. Louis, France 
had looked upon Egypt as being of all parts 
of the nearer East that which was most 
specially designed for her consumption. Its 
civilisation was old, famous and decayed, its 
military power reported to be inconsiderable, 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 61 

its Government lodged in the hands of the 
alien and tyrannous Mamelukes. The con- 
quest of the Nile valley by France had been 
recommended by Leibnitz, the most famous 
of German philosophers and projected by 
Choiseul, the one efficient adviser of Louis 
XV. It would undoubtedly annoy the Eng- 
lish, and it would temporarily remove from 
the sphere of domestic politics a man who 
was already too great for a subject and too 
dangerous for a democracy. The chief diffi- 
culty, that of finance, was overcome in a 
manner characteristic of republican France. 
Switzerland was invaded on a flimsy pretext, 
and out of the lucrative spoiling of Berne $ 
three million francs were allotted to the con- 
quest of Egypt. 

On May 19, 1798, Napoleon set sail from 
Toulon, attended by a brilliant galaxy of 
generals, savants, artists and engineers, and 
leading an army of 38,000 seasoned and 
proven troops. Berthier was again chief of 
the staff; Marmont, Lannes, Murat, Desaix, 
Kleber were among the generals; a corps of 
illustrious mathematicians, geologists, anti- 
quarians and chemists advertised the civil 
preoccupations of the General-in-Chief. This 
was to be no vulgar conquest. Napoleon, 
who had been recently elected a member of 
the Institute, was fired with the idea of 
bringing the dark and mysterious land of the 
Pharaohs into the full light of scientific 
knowledge. He would understand the East, 
its laws and customs, its art and archaeology, 



m NAPOLEON 

its industry and agriculture, above all its 
religion, which is the warp and woof of Orien- 
tal life. The Bible and the Koran should be 
part of his political library. He would cajole 
the East in its own language and through the 
medium of its own ideas. Through him 
France should become an Egyptian power, 
intelligent, sympathetic, stooping to the 
mind, and developing the resources of the 
country, and above all drawing from its 
inert and plentiful population fresh supplies 
of military strength. 

The convoy of 400 slow-moving transports 
from France to Egypt was attended by enor- 
mous and imponderable risks. With Nelson 
in the Mediterranean, and everything depend- 
ing on rapidity, Napoleon had the temerity 
to attack Malta, and the good fortune to find 
that an almost impregnable fortress was held 
by a garrison of traitors and cowards. Va- 
letta was surrendered on June 13, and the 
French flotilla arrived off Alexandria on July 
1. The disembarkation was uncontested, but 
had Napoleon arrived three days earlier, he 
would have found Nelson and thirteen 74 's 
waiting to give him a reception. While the 
English Admiral was racing for Egypt, Na- 
poleon had astutely directed his fleet to skirt 
the southern shore of Candia. With a little 
less loitering on the one side and a little more 
patience on the other, the greatest soldier and 
the greatest sailor in history would have met 
in a naval battle which could have ended 
only in a crushing disaster for the French. 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 63 

To attack Egypt with success it is neces- 
sary to march upon Cairo, pursuing either the 
extreme eastern or the extreme western 
channel of the Nile, and above all avoiding 
the Delta triangle, with its intricate web of 
marsh and canal which proved so fatal to 
the crusade of St. Louis. Napoleon intui- 
tively perceived the essential conditions of 
Egyptian strategy. Advancing from Alex- 
andria along the western route, he opposed to 
the impetuous cavalry of the Mamelukes 
an army ranged in squares and powerfully 
assisted by artillery. A crushing victory 
near the Pyramids, obtained at a trifling cost 
and only twenty-three days after the landing, 
gave him Cairo and the mastery of Lower 
Egypt. Had the Nile been high, the pursuit 
would have been carried further, and the 
broken fragments of the Mameluke hosts 
would never have had time to reform. 

Decisive as were the initial successes of 
u the father of fire," the position of the French 
army in the midst of a fanatical Moslem 
population was necessarily insecure. Napo- 
leon was alive to the necessity of humouring 
the religious prejudices of a superstitious 
race. He remembered how Alexander the 
Great, visiting the Temple of Ammon, had 
caused himself to be declared the Son of 
Jupiter, " doing more by that act to assure his 
conquests than if he had summoned a hun- 
dred and twenty thousand Macedonians to 
his aid." He would tread the same path of 
wise accommodation. In the famous school 



64 NAPOLEON 

of Gama-el-Azbar at Cairo, sixty doctors, or 
ulemas, were wont to deliberate on points of 
law and to explain the sacred books. To 
these solemn guardians of Moslem orthodoxy 
the anxious theologian from Corsica would 
gravely expose the state of his devout and 
trembling soul, would propound questions of 
Holy Writ, and express his extreme venera- 
tion for the Prophet. It was represented to 
the Arab teachers that but for two obstacles, 
wine and circumcision, the first proscribed 
and the second enjoined by the express text 
of the Koran, there was good ground for 
expecting a general conversion of the French 
in Egypt. And since the acute atheism of the 
Republican Army was as yet luckily unaf- 
fected by Catholic practice, it was indicated 
that the precious seed would fall upon a 
virgin soil. That nothing might be wanting 
to complete the delusion, designs were drawn 
by order of Napoleon for the construction of 
a mosque large enough to contain the whole 
French army on that blessed and not too 
distant day when, by the operation of grace, 
it should be brought to acknowledge that 
there is no God but Allah, and that Moham- 
med is His prophet. 

The work of Napoleon in Egypt was rudely 
disturbed by two events, each of which might 
have been surmised as not unlikely to occur 
— a British victory at sea and a breach in 
the friendship between France and Turkey. 
On August 1 the French fleet was destroyed 
by Nelson in Aboukir Bay, and the commu- 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 65 

nications of the army with France abruptly 
and effectually severed. The news of a 
reverse far less crucial than this has often 
sufficed to demoralise an army. Napoleon's 
troops were already bitterly disappointed 
with Egypt. They expected palaces of marble 
and they found hovels of mud; wine, and they 
were put off with brackish water; welcome, 
and at any moment, if straying from camp, 
they were liable to murder and mutilation. 
To men in such a temper any fresh aggrava- 
tion might have been the signal for mutiny. 
But when the news of the disaster reached 
Cairo Napoleon received it with composure. 
Summoning his officers around him he ad- 
dressed them with superb and unruffled 
confidence. He touched upon the vast re- 
sources of Egypt awaiting development, and 
observed that a country which had once been 
a powerful monarchy might in the advanced 
state of science and industry not only return 
to its former prosperity, but advance to an 
inconceivable pitch of greatness. He re- 
minded them that their position was impreg- 
nable, encamped as they were in a land with 
no frontiers but the desert on one side and a 
flat, unsheltered coast on the other. Above 
all things he exhorted them to preserve 
the army from discouragement, and to re- 
member that occasions such as these were the 
crucible of character. "We must raise our 
heads," he added in a proud and imaginative 
conclusion, "above the floods of the tempest 
and the floods will be tamed. We are perhaps 



66 NAPOLEON 

destined to change the face of the East, and 
to place our names by the side of those whom 
ancient and medieval history recalls with 
most brilliance to our memory." 

A month later Turkey declared war on 
France, and Napoleon's position in Egypt 
became exposed to new dangers from within 
and without. Firmans from the Sultan were 
read aloud in the mosques, calling upon the 
Faithful to eject the enemy of Islam, and a 
portion of the Cairene population acting upon 
this advice was punished for its dangerous 
rebellion with Oriental severity. In the fol- 
lowing January while Napoleon was at Suez, 
examining the traces of the old canal which 
connected the Nile with the Red Sea, he 
learnt that Achmed Pasha (surnamed D jezzar 
the Slaughterer), the Grand Vizier and Gov- 
ernor of Syria, had collected an army for the 
invasion of Egypt, and that El Arisch, the 
frontier fortress, had fallen into the hands of 
his vanguard. No intelligence could have 
been more welcome to Napoleon than a move 
which gave to the invasion of Syria the 
character of a defensive operation. He felt 
that it was time to refresh the confidence of 
his troops by new triumphs. He could not 
return to France as he originally intended, nor 
without considerable reinforcements march 
upon India; but the conquest of Syria pre- 
sented a combination of advantages. It would 
undoubtedly be easy, it would secure the 
eastern frontier of Egypt, deprive England 
of a naval base, spread the fame of Napoleon 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 67 

far and wide through the East, and supply a 
convenient point of departure for the con- 
quest of Asia Minor and European Turkey. 
For a third time Bonaparte would assume the 
role of a deliverer. As he had delivered Italy 
from the Austrians and Egypt from the 
Mamelukes, so he would now proceed to 
rescue the suffering population of Syria from 
the intolerable yoke of Djezzar. 

The Syrian campaign, conducted under 
parching skies and to the accompaniment of 
thirst, hunger and plague, ended before the 
walls of a trumpery seaport town in the re- 
pulse which changed the destinies of the 
world. At first the small army of Bonaparte 
carried all before it. It took El Arisch, 
stormed Jaffa, and then (March 19, 1799) 
sat down to besiege Acre, the residence of 
the slaughtering Vizier. Here a demonstra- 
tion was made of the truth that a country 
possessing a seaboard can never be wholly 
conquered, if the defending force is strong 
and the attacking force impotent on the 
water. The enemy who foiled Napoleon at 
Acre was not the blundering and murderous 
Turk, but the sea-power of England adroitly 
used by that vain, eccentric, and chivalrous 
hero, Sir Sidney Smith. The English Admiral, 
helped by the admirable science of Picard 
de Phelippeaux, a French royalist engineer, 
threw such vigour into the defences that for 
more than two months this inconsiderable 
fortress resisted the mines, bombardments 
and assaults of Napoleon. On March 20 the 



68 NAPOLEON 

siege was raised. Plague had broken out in 
the French camp, ammunition had run short, 
and the casualties in the two crowning 
assaults were not far short of 3000. Intelli- 
gence of a Turkish fleet heading for the Delta 
showed Napoleon that not a moment must 
be lost. On June 14, after a march of more 
than 300 miles on short rations and over 
broken tracks, the army of Syria was back 
in Cairo, having shown in this wonderful race 
of twenty-six days what hardships men may 
endure and what feats they may be driven to 
perform by the iron will of a great commander. 
Despite the wastage of war and plague, 
Napoleon had a force in Egypt sufficient, if 
cleverly disposed, to deal with the immediate 
danger from the north. The Turks, 15,000 
strong, landed at Aboukir and then waited 
behind indifferent entrenchments until Napo- 
leon was ready for the assault. If the com- 
parative percentage of casualties is the crucial 
measure of success in a battle, the French 
victory won on August 25 was the most com- 
plete in history. The Ottoman army, at- 
tacked by a force of little more than half its 
numbers, but infinitely its superior in leader- 
ship, dash and equipment, was shot down, 
driven into the sea and destroyed to a man. 
Every circumstance connected with Napole- 
on's conduct of the operations was marked by 
sovereign qualities of precision, rapidity and 
resolve — the evacuation of Upper Egypt, the 
quick concentration of the striking force, the 
solidity of the attack on the central earth- 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 69 

works, the brilliant charge, delivered at the 
psychological moment, of Murat's cavalry on 
the left wing. The reverse of Acre was 
obliterated by the triumph of Aboukir. 

More than two months before the battle 
Napoleon had resolved to escape from Egypt. 
In March, while encamped before the walls 
of Acre, he received intelligence from home 
that war had again broken out on the Conti- 
nent, and that Russia, Austria, Sardinia and 
Naples were in league against the Republic. 
He then told General Dommartin that he 
intended to return to France with a few of 
his generals. The arguments for the adop- 
tion of such a course, plausible in March, were 
strengthened by news received through the 
malice of an enemy. Sir Sidney Smith, 
cruising off Alexandria, supplied Napoleon 
with a packet of newspapers from which he 
learnt that the French had been swept out 
of Italy, and that the soil of France was once 
more exposed to the risk of invasion. In these 
circumstances even the purest patriot, assum- 
ing that he was conscious of transcendent 
military ability, might have argued that his 
place was home and his task the defence of 
his country. Napoleon, from motives cer- 
tainly not unmixed with personal ambition, 
came to the same conclusion. Loudly pro- 
fessing indignation at the corrupt and igno- 
rant Government which had squandered the 
triumphs of Areola and Rivoli, he divined 
with secret pleasure that the incompetence 
of the Directors was his own opportunity. 



70 NAPOLEON 

Very secretly, therefore, on the night of 
August 21, he set sail from Alexandria, 
accompanied by Monge and Berthollet and 
the seven ablest officers in his command. 
The splendid soldiers who for his sake, under 
strange and tropical skies, had faced hunger 
and thirst, wounds and death, suddenly found 
themselves deserted by their chief; and even 
Kleber, the capable general to whom the 
command was bequeathed, first learnt of his 
appointment by letter when it was too late 
to protest by word of mouth. 

So the Egyptian romance, which had begun 
in a blaze of glory, ended in a conspirator's 
flight. On any sound estimate of probabili- 
ties the enterprise was bound to fail, partly by 
reason of the English supremacy at sea, and 
partly because no conquest of Egypt can ever 
be secure until the wild Arabs of the Soudan 
have been thoroughly subdued. But even 
admitting that it had been possible for the 
genius of Napoleon so to rivet the French 
dominion on the Nile valley that it could 
defy a maritime blockade and the long attri- 
tion of a desert war, the two larger designs 
to which Egypt was to serve as a modest 
prelude were wildly impracticable. When we 
consider the hardships which the small 
French expeditionary force endured in its 
comparatively short march through Syria, the 
difficulties of the commissariat, the wastage 
through disease, and the losses in battle, how 
could the Indian expedition, undertaken with 
a force large and therefore more difficult to 



EGYPT AND SYRIA 71 

support, and travelling over greater distances 
and through countries far more barren and 
far less explored than Palestine, have ended 
otherwise than in disaster? Nor was the 
plan of overturning the Turkish Empire, 
which was unfolded to Bourrienne just before 
the raising of the siege of Acre, much more 
promising. An army of 9000 men marching 
in the height of summer from Acre to Con- 
stantinople would not arrive at its destina- 
tion intact. Assuming that Napoleon suc- 
ceeded in bringing 7000 men to the shores of 
the Bosphorus, how would he cross? And 
how would he take Constantinople, defended 
as it was sure to be by the united strength of 
the British and Turkish navies? Both 
schemes were touched with insanity, and if 
the conquest of Constantinople was a serious 
project only relinquished through the resist- 
ance of Acre, then Sir Sidney Smith stood 
between Napoleon and failure. 

But the fact that there was an element of 
unsound calculation in the whole Egyptian 
expedition, and more particularly in the 
two unrealised projects which were em- 
broidered upon it, does not disparage the 
grandeur and permanence of its results. 
Napoleon introduced Egypt to the methods 
of a civilised government, and Europe to the 
scientific study of the ancient monuments 
and language of the Nile valley. "For the 
first time since the Eoman Empire," he writes 
when recounting the expedition of Desaix to 
Upper Egypt, "a civilised nation, cultivating 



72 NAPOLEON 

the arts and sciences, was about to visit, 
measure and explore those superb ruins which 
for so many centuries have engaged the curi- 
osity of the learned world." A trilingual 
inscription discovered at Rosetta by a French 
officer in Napoleon's army put into the hands 
of Champollion the key to the hieroglyphs; 
and The Description of Egypt, a monu- 
mental work built out of the observations and 
researches of the savants who accompanied 
the army, is the first scientific and comprehen- 
sive account of the country which 400 years 
before Christ inspired Herodotus to write the 
most famous and brilliant pages of his history. 
Upon Napoleon himself the Egyptian and 
Syrian campaigns shed a new and romantic 
lustre. Genius could ask for no better adver- 
tisement than the rapid conquest, however 
superficial, of two lands bound up with all 
the oldest and most hallowed memories of 
the Christian polity. Alexandria, the Pyra- 
mids, Jaffa, Nazareth, what names were more 
familiar than these, — so famous in sacred 
and profane antiquity, and now illustrated 
anew by the victories of Bonaparte? The 
bulletins from the seat of war gave no indica- 
tion of failure, for even the repulse at Acre 
was disguised as a triumph. Rather they 
imparted to their French readers a thrill of 
pride in the wonderful youth whose brilliant 
course among the classic scenes of the ancient 
world exceeded the French epic of the 
Crusades, and shone out in dazzling contrast 
against the gloomy and sordid canvas of 
domestic disorders and defeats. 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 73 
CHAPTER IV 

THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 

Months before a voter was invited to the 
polls, France had by a plebiscite of the heart 
entrusted its destinies to Napoleon. When 
he landed at Frejus after the long obscuration 
of a six weeks' voyage, a thrill of delirious joy 
shot through the country, as though at last 
a sovereign medicine were found for all the 
diseases of the body politic. The govern- 
ment of lawyers had fallen into the last stage 
of discredit. The country was tired of war 
and revolution. It was reasonable to assume 
that the conqueror of Italy and the organiser 
of Egypt, a man standing apart from the 
violent feuds and trivial commotions of Paris, 
and uncommitted to any cause save that of 
the Republic, would discover some means of 
ending a situation daily becoming more in- 
tolerable; that he would force the Austrians, 
Russians and English to an honourable peace; 
that he would still the royalist trouble in the 
Vendee; that he would put down the socialists 
and the brigands, mend the roads, restore the 
finances, and give to France the inestimable 
boon of a just, fair and regular government. 
So in medieval Italy a town rent by furious 
discord would invite the impartial award of 
an alien judge. 

It is this state of the public mind first 
declared in the tumultuous welcome of 
October, and afterwards expressed in legal 



74 NAPOLEON 

form through the plebiscite, which gives to 
Napoleon's Government its apology and 
foundation. Unlike the monarchs of Berlin, 
Vienna or St. Petersburg, Napoleon drew his 
power not from descent but from the foun- 
tain of popular will. He claimed that he was 
the child of the Revolution, that the voice of 
millions favoured his rise, and sanctioned his 
dominion. And this conception of a govern- 
ment neither republican nor monarchical, but 
partaking of both qualities, each in an ex- 
treme form, inasmuch as it was both absolute 
in power and popular in origin, is part of 
his political bequest to France. Against 
authority so derived, governments depending 
on heredity or set up by foreign armies neces- 
sarily appeared illegitimate; and the formal 
logic of democracy was on the side of the 
Bonapartists, who, after the Bourbons had 
been placed on the French throne as the 
result of an English victory, declared that 
aliens could neither make nor unmake lawful 
governments in France, and that a nation 
could alone rightfully abolish the authority 
which a nation had solemnly conferred. 

The method by which Bonaparte made 
himself master of France is characteristic of 
the man and the age. He overturned the 
constitution by ruse and violence: "It is 
the epoch of my life," he explained to Mme. 
de Remusat, "in which I have shown most 
ability." On his arrival in Paris, with the 
laurels of Aboukir freshly glistening on his 
brow, and all France acclaiming him as a 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 75 

hero, he suddenly put off the soldier and 
appeared in the role of the modest and stu- 
dious civilian. Now he would read a paper to 
the Institute on Egyptian archaeology, now he 
would stroll out into the streets in the com- 
pany of an illustrious savant. Cedant arma 
togce. It was his design to advertise himself 
not as the brilliant gambler in empires, but in 
his other aspect, as a man versed in the arts of 
peace, eager for knowledge and respectful of 
intellect. For many weeks he contented 
himself with observing the political eddies of 
the town, exploring every party but com- 
mitting himself to none. Then, finding that 
there was within the Directory a man of like 
purpose to himself, he entered into confed- 
eracy with the Abbe Sieyes and plotted the 
coup d'etat of Brumaire. 

Even a discredited constitution cannot 
safely be exploded into the air without a nice 
attention to detail. The two conspirators, 
the one a man of action who believed in the 
autocracy of the sword, the other a philoso- 
pher who had framed a scheme of checks and 
balances, were only so far agreed that both 
wished to destroy the Directory with as little 
offence as possible to the Republican con- 
science of the country. But herein exactly 
lay the difficulty of the problem. Republi- 
canism was still the strongest political power 
in France; it was the creed of generals like 
Jourdan and Moreau, of two out of the five 
Directors, of the great majority of the Coun- 
cil of Five Hundred. No revolution could be 



76 NAPOLEON 

successful which appeared to put in question 
the issue which for the vast majority of active 
political minds in France was once and for all 
decided by the abolition of the monarchy. It 
was, therefore, necessary to tread delicately. 
Since Bonaparte could not by reason of his 
youth be brought into the Directory, it was 
decided that the Directors should simul- 
taneously resign, and that upon the news 
of this event the two Legislative Councils 
should entrust the revision of the constitu- 
tion to the architects of the plot. 

The design was simple and bold, but de- 
manded a campaign of anxious intrigue 
crowned by a sudden demonstration of force. 
Active exploration showed that three of the 
Directors were not to be counted on, that 
sixty of the Ancients were doubtful, that 
nothing could be hoped from the Five Hun- 
dred, and that the temper of the Jacobin 
workmen made Paris a dangerous scene for 
an anti-Jacobin experiment. Accordingly it 
was arranged that the Council of Ancients 
should take advantage of its constitutional 
right to decree the transfer of the Legislature 
to St. Cloud on the pretext of a conspiracy 
dangerous to its deliberations. There at a 
safe distance from the fiery humours of the 
Paris workshops, and in the midst of a park 
filled with his war-soiled and obedient vet- 
erans, Bonaparte might extract from the last 
revolutionary Assembly of France its official 
death-warrant. The plan was duly executed 
on 18 and 19 Brum aire (November 9 and 10, 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 77 

1799), days memorable in history as witness- 
ing the rise of Napoleon to civil power. 
When the Ancients had passed their decree 
on the morning of the 18th, Napoleon rode 
down to the Tuileries at the head of a brilliant 
cavalcade and swore an oath to preserve a 
free and equal Republic. Afterwards, to the 
secretary of a Director who came to meet him 
in the gardens, he spoke words which re- 
sounded through the length and breadth of 
the country: "What have you done with 
this France which I left so brilliant? I left 
you peace, I find war. I left you victories, I 
find defeat. I left you the millions of Italy, 
I find laws of spoliation and misery." But 
on the next day his adjurations fell with less 
effect on the angry and suspicious legislators 
who were gathered together in the palace of 
St. Cloud. They saw themselves trapped into 
the midst of a hostile army upon the pretext 
of a plot which they suspected to be imagi- 
nary, and in the interests of a scheme which 
they divined to be little else than rule of the 
sword. When after a wild and incoherent 
speech to the Ancients, Bonaparte suddenly 
appeared in the Orangery, where the Lower 
House, presided over by Lucien, was holding 
its session, a sudden storm of passion surged 
up against him and he was borne fainting 
from the hall. Then it was that the clever 
but shallow rhetorician, who by a fortunate 
accident was in the chair, for a second time 
influenced the life of Napoleon. While the 
members were howling for a decree of out- 



78 NAPOLEON 

lawry, Lucien slipped away, rode out to his 
brother in the park, and called upon the 
troops to deliver the Assembly from a pack 
of audacious brigands, the hirelings of Pitt 
who were destroying its liberties. The melo- 
drama was congenial and the lie effective. A 
few minutes later in that dim November 
afternoon the bayonets of the grenadiers 
gleamed in the entrance of the Orangery, and 
a huddled band of red-robed deputies rushed 
for the doors, leapt out of the windows, and 
swiftly scattering through the gloom of the 
trees and bushes were lost to view and to 
history. In the early dawn a small committee 
of both Chambers, selected from the partisans 
of revision, decreed a provisional government 
consisting of Bonaparte, Sieves and Roger 
Ducos pending the elaboration of organic 
laws. So without a drop of blood shed and 
to the measureless satisfaction of the country 
the long reign of the Jacobins was brought 
to an end. 

The constitution which was set up a month 
later, while preserving the show of political 
liberty, placed the supreme power in the 
hands of Bonaparte. In deference to the 
current practice of regarding Rome as the 
parent of republican virtue, the highest ex- 
ecutive officers were styled consuls, and the 
apparatus of government was supplied with 
a Tribunate to debate the bills and a Senate 
to safeguard the constitution. But no astute 
person was deceived by these analogies, nor 
by the contrivances, due to the ingenuity of 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 79 

Sieyes, for gradually filtering the currents of 
public opinion into the central cisterns of 
government. The First Consul during the 
ten years of his office was to be master of the 
State. He named the ministers, controlled 
the administration and called the policy. 
The real legislative organ was neither the 
Tribunate, which could speak but not vote, 
nor yet the Legislature, which could vote 
but not speak; but the Council of State, a 
body of chosen experts, to whom was en- 
trusted under the presidency of the First 
Consul the duty of drafting and initiating 
laws. Neither was a check upon autocracy 
supplied by the plural character of the su- 
preme executive committee. Napoleon's 
colleagues were neither rivals of his power nor 
critics of his policy. The one, Cambaceres, 
an able jurist, drawn from the ranks of the 
Jacobin regicides, expended such time as he 
could spare from the law upon the delights 
of the table; the other, Lebrun, was simply 
a modest and cultured savant of the old 
monarchy, caught up and tied to the trium- 
phal car of Napoleon as a signal pledge that 
even such antecedents were no bar to service 
under the new regime. 

In place of the old revolutionary watch- 
words, the mottoes of the new Government 
were splendour, comprehension and efficiency. 
Democracy has been rich in statesmen who 
have known how to appeal with varying 
degrees of refinement to the imagination of 
great masses of men; but in the art of deco- 



80 NAPOLEON 

rating government for the public eye Napo- 
leon is pioneer and prince. The vision of 
ancient Rome, shining in the trophies of its 
world-wide conquest and covering half Eu- 
rope with its causeways and baths, its marble 
amphitheatres and gigantic aqueducts, was 
continually before him; and what Rome had 
done and been in the past, Paris might do 
and be in the present. He conceived it as 
belonging to the province of statesmanship, 
not only to make laws and to administer 
provinces, but to bequeath to posterity visi- 
ble memorials of its grandeur. The idea of 
making Paris the capital of European art 
and scholarship had been entertained by the 
Directory, and was promoted by the spolia- 
tions of Napoleon's first campaign in Italy. 
Now that he was master of Prance the flowing 
tide of foreign conquest might again contrib- 
ute to swell domestic magnificence; and to 
this design was superadded the project of 
giving the world a new conception of the 
degree to which the public works and indus- 
trial arts of a country could be promoted by 
an active and splendour-loving Government. 
It was a second article in Napoleon's creed 
that Government should be founded on a 
broad base. Soldiers who learn their politics 
in the stern school of war are not hampered 
in their choice of instruments by a nice 
regard for variances in theology or politics. 
Napoleon chose his servants, as Cromwell 
his soldiers, upon a wide principle of tolera- 
tion. He meant Jacobins, Girondins and 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 81 

Royalists to receive the shelter of equal laws, 
and in the discipline of his employment to 
outgrow the narrowing embitterment of the 
recent strife. The laws against the SmigrSs 
were relaxed; the Catholic Church was soon 
made to feel that the era of persecution was 
over, and that the new Government was 
disposed to come to an accommodation with 
the religious conscience of the country. 
"When my service is in question," said the 
First Consul, "all passions must be laid 
aside." 

Of efficiency in administration there has 
been no greater master, for this depends not 
only on industry and method, on grasp of 
principle and attention to detail, but also 
on the rarer powers of inspiration and com- 
mand. Napoleon could at a pinch work 
eighteen hours in the twenty-four. "He 
would often," says Chaptal, "keep his 
Councils for eight or ten hours, and it was 
always he who bore the burden of the talk 
and contention." At any hour of night or 
morning, after any spell of exhausting work, 
nobody saw his mind otherwise than keen and 
alert. His cross-examination of experts was 
quick, searching and thorough, his tenacity 
such that he never attacked a subject without 
pursuing it to the point at which certainty 
emerged. Being sober in his habits, with no 
predilection for any particular food, and 
rarely spending more than ten or twelve 
minutes at table unless the conversation 
pleased him, he was a miracle and pattern 



82 NAPOLEON 

of labour to his subordinates. Without any 
systematic education, with little Latin and 
no Greek, constantly mispronouncing French 
words, saying section for session, fulminant for 
culminant, voyageres for viageres, he neverthe- 
less in a few months established an intellect- 
ual ascendancy over the strongest and best- 
trained minds in Paris. His confidence in 
his own powers — a great point in a man — 
was boundless. On occasions when his coun- 
cillors differed from him, he would tap his 
head saying, "This good instrument is more 
useful to me than the advice of men who are 
accounted well-trained and experienced," and 
so he went his own way, trusting to his 
intuition, to his exact and capacious memory, 
to his exquisite lucidity of mind, snatching, 
as he went, with savage rapidity, the scraps 
of intellectual food which were auxiliary to 
action. In finance and account-keeping he 
was the most rigorous and exacting of mas- 
ters, and every clerk who drove a quill in a 
Government office knew at once that the day 
of the sloven was over, and worked with 
treble energy as if the stern eye of Napoleon 
were glaring down upon his desk. In all the 
mechanical side of administration, down to 
the rules for a card-index or catalogue, he 
had nothing to learn from subordinates. And 
in the spirit of direction, which is more im- 
portant than any mechanism, he was un- 
equalled. In civil, as in military, affairs the 
dispatches of the First Consul receive no 
injury from the impetuous haste with which 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 83 

they were dictated to his secretaries. They 
are terse and peremptory, but never fum- 
bling and obscure, and so expressive of the 
native temperament of their author, that the 
reader who opens a volume no matter at what 
place seems to hear the hard, imperious utter- 
ance and to take heat from the movement of 
the glowing mind. 

It was probably essential to the restoration 
of efficient government in France that the 
will of Napoleon should be unobstructed by 
local liberties. A system of local government 
can hardly work well without some kind of 
aristocracy, or at least some general measure 
of mutual confidence. Neither of these con- 
ditions was present in 1799. The French 
Revolution had destroyed the old aristocracy 
of France and scattered the seeds of hate 
and faction broadcast through the land. 
Napoleon, therefore, was driven by circum- 
stances to revert to the centralisation which 
had been the cardinal feature of French 
Government ever since the days of Richelieu. 
The prefect in the department, the sub- 
prefect in the arrondissement, the mayor 
in the Commune are the creatures of the 
central government and the obedient instru- 
ments of its will. This, in a word, is tyranny; 
but perhaps no medicine less drastic could 
have cooled the poisonous fevers which for 
the last ten years had been raging in the body 
politic of France. 

There was to be no return to the ancien 
regime. It was not the least among the many 



84 NAPOLEON 

benefits conferred by Napoleon that the bad 
forms of social privilege, abolished by the first 
revolutionary assembly, found no place in his 
system, and that the peasant under his power- 
ful rule acquired a fresh sense of certainty 
that never again would he be plagued by the 
game laws, the courts and the exactions of 
the seigneur. The Legion of Honour, a non- 
hereditary decoration conferred for military 
and civil services, was attacked by the purists 
of equality but defended by Napoleon as a 
spur to ambition and an instrument of govern- 
ment. "It is with baubles," he said, "that 
men are led." Nor was there any material 
change in the lav/ of inheritance as it was 
left by the revolutionary assemblies. The 
civil code proceeds upon the idea that in the 
main it is a desirable thing that properties 
should be equally divided at death, though 
a certain proportion of the inheritance (quo- 
tiU disponible) may be bequeathed at the dis- 
cretion of the testator. In the bad old days 
of the monarchy industry and commerce were 
throttled by guild regulations, internal 
customs dues, and a fiscal system so iniqui- 
tously calculated that its principal weight 
fell on those who were least able to bear 
it. These inequalities, rudely and suddenly 
swept away in the storm of the Revolu- 
tion, were never allowed to reappear. Na- 
poleon knew that however small a price 
France might set upon political liberty, she 
would never tolerate the restoration of social 
privilege. He offered "a career open to 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 8* 

talent," holding it to be at once the criterion 
of democracy and one of the prime secrets of 
statesmanship, so to provide that no citizen, 
however humble, should be debarred by dis- 
paragement of birth and connections from the 
highest office and eminence in the State. 

If any further proof is wanted of the con- 
tinuing influence of the Revolution, it is 
provided by the fact that Napoleon adopted 
and confirmed the revolutionary land-settle- 
ment. In the question which of all other 
questions touched most deeply the material 
interests of the country he sided not with 
the reaction but with the Revolution. He 
never proposed to ask the peasant to disgorge 
the acres of the priest and the noble, which 
during the ten years of pandemonium had 
passed, sometimes by purchase at a derisory 
rate, sometimes even without that formality, 
into his hands. On the contrary, it was an 
essential part of Napoleon's policy to fortify 
these ambiguous and disputed titles, and to 
secure for them not only the protection of the 
State but even the sanction of the despoiled 
and outraged Church. No course could have 
been more prudent than so to enlist upon 
the side of the new Government the greatest 
and most characteristic economic interest 
in France. Every peasant recognised in 
Napoleon his protector; and as the religious 
reformation in England was made secure by 
the distribution among the squirearchy of the 
rich plunder of the Catholic Church, so the 
protection accorded by the First Consul to 



86 NAPOLEON 

the new titles acquired during the Revo- 
lution was the most effective pledge which 
could be given to the nation that the old 
order would never be restored. 

There was the more reason for insisting 
upon these essentials of the new democracy, 
since in other parts of his policy Napoleon was 
determined to discard the practice of the later 
revolution. In no department of his work did 
he encounter a greater mass of criticism* 
whispered or unavowed, than in his dealings 
with the Church. It had become a fashion, 
not only with the learned class, but with that 
great body of active bourgeoisie who controlled 
the course of the Revolution, to dismiss re- 
ligion as a foolish lie and to see in the Church 
an organ of obscurantism, privilege and op- 
pression, whose power should be abridged 
and whose activities should be jealously sur- 
veyed. Probably the whole cultivated society 
of Paris, mos 4- of the generals and officers of 
the army, and a large proportion of the more 
successful politicians, were now declared 
infidels or indifferents. They viewed the 
priest as the prey of a decaying superstition, 
as the ally of the foreigner and the enemy of 
his country. And to this conviction expres- 
sion had been fully given by the law-givers 
and administrators of the Revolution. In 
1791 the Constituent Assembly despoiled the 
Church of its landed property, placed it upon 
a reduced establishment and asked it to ac- 
cept a democratic constitution, possibly coun- 
tenanced by the practice of the Apostolic 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 87 

Age, but certainly repugnant to the custom of 
recent centuries and to the Catholic con- 
science. All over the country honest and scru- 
pulous Catholics refused to take the oath of 
the new constitution. They were persecuted 
with every device which the ingenuity and in- 
tolerance of that age could suggest, but in- 
tolerance has often failed before and it failed 
then. The schism in the Church persisted, 
the refractory clergy celebrating before 
crowds in the fields and woods, the "con- 
stitutionals" enjoying the barren splendour 
of empty cathedrals. Eventually even the 
meagre salaries of the faithful "constitu- 
tionals" became too great a burden for the 
bankrupt Treasury. The Catholic Church 
was disestablished. The State declared its 
neutrality in the sphere of religious dogma. 
But lest the revolutionary settlement should 
be imperilled by the manifestation of beliefs, 
safe only when secluded, no priest might go in 
procession, fluttering the white surplice in the 
streets, nor church bell ring into the air its 
simple summons to devotion. 

While preserving the agnosticism of his 
early manhood, Napoleon did not share the 
view that religion was a decaying power in 
the world. He knew the story of the Vendee 
and had seen the Italian peasant at his shrine. 
All through the Catholic world he descried in 
the country-folk a simple faith in saints and 
miracles, in the godly rule of the Holy Father 
of Rome, in the efficacious intercession of the 
Mother of Christ in heaven. To the states- 



88 NAPOLEON 

man such spiritual forces swaying the lives of 
the agricultural and military class were all im- 
portant. He must annex and control them. 
Religion was not to be dismissed like a dis- 
carded theory in chemistry. It was "the 
mystery of the social order/' the "vaccine" 
against grosser forms of charlatanism, the 
golden hope which kept the outcasts of the 
world in bondage to a lot otherwise intolerable. 
One evening as he strolled with a councillor 
of State in the park of Malmaison, Bonaparte 
opened a conversation on religion. "I was 
here last Sunday," he said, "walking in this 
solitude, this silence of Nature. The sound of 
the church bell of Ruel suddenly struck upon 
my ear. I was moved; so strong is the power 
of early habit and education. I said to my- 
self, 'What an impression that must make 
upon the simple and credulous.' How can 
your philosophers and idealogues answer 
that? The people must have a religion, and 
that religion must be in the hands of the 
Government. . . . People will say that I am 
a Papist. I am nothing. I was a Moham- 
medan in Egypt, I shall be a Catholic here 
for the good of the people. I do not believe 
in religions . . . but the idea of a God" — 
and raising his hands to heaven — "who has 
made all that!" In all ages and under 
all conditions the priest was the natural 
ally of the civil governor. His duty was to 
teach the passive virtues, to discourse 
upon "the morality which unites," not upon 
"the doctrine which divides," to help his 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 89 

parishioners by his smattering of law, agri- 
culture and medicine, and through the sooth- 
ing power of his ministrations to promote the 
ends of social discipline. "Fifty SmigrS 
bishops in English pay," observed Napoleon, 
"are the present leaders of the French clergy. 
Their influence must be destroyed, and for 
this I must have the authority of the 
Pope." 

For these among other reasons Napoleon 
resolved to come to terms with Rome. The 
negotiation was conducted in Paris, upon the 
side of the Italian cardinals with tenacity and 
finesse, upon that of Napoleon with subtlety 
shading into fraud. At last, in August 1802, 
the Concordat was accepted which for a hun- 
dred and three years continued to govern 
the relations between Church and State in 
France. The Pope recognised the constitu- 
tional clergy, the reduced establishment, the 
revolutionary land settlement. The First 
Consul re-established the Catholic Church in 
France, guaranteed its right to public worship, 
and acknowledged it to be the religion of the 
majority of Frenchmen. The principle of es- 
tablishment, then as now, had many enemies, 
but it is difficult to contest the value of an 
arrangement which soothed the fears of the 
peasantry, healed the schism in the French 
Church, and save for an inconsiderable body 
of non-jurors, reconciled the Catholic con- 
science to the government of the day. "The 
altars," in Bonaparte's phrase, "were re- 
stored"; but the clergy were soon to dis- 



90 NAPOLEON 

cover that they had bought recognition at a 
heavy price. By a series of "organic regula- 
tions" suddenly tacked on to the Concordat 
they were bound hand and foot, the helpless 
instruments of an omnipotent State. 

Before this Napoleon had already defined 
his attitude to that intractable spirit in poli- 
tics which is the creature and bequest of revo- 
lution. While everything, from a village 
mayoralty to a seat in the Council of State, 
was open to such members of the Jacobin 
and royalist parties as rallied to the Govern- 
ment, the irreconcilable was thrown beyond 
the pale of toleration and justice. When, 
on December 24, 1800, an attempt was made 
to blow up the First Consul as he drove to 
the opera, the offence was visited not upon 
the guilty but undiscovered royalists, but on 
the extreme members of the Jacobin con- 
nection, who were known to be dangerous 
and were hastily assumed to be connected 
with the plot. Without a particle of solid 
evidence against them a hundred and thirty 
Jacobins were deported by Napoleon, not so 
much in expiation of past offences but as a 
guarantee against future crime. Something 
may be excused to the man who goes about 
in constant peril from assassination; but to 
correct atrocity by injustice is to ignore the 
alphabet of statesmanship. 

The royalist was less dangerous than the 
Jacobin and far less easy to absorb in the 
economy of the new State. His capital was 
London, his sphere of belligerent operations 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 91 

the wild and tangled regions of Western 
France, his force the allegiance of a desperate 
peasantry and the sympathy of Catholic men 
and women all over the world. The first task 
of the French Republic was to crush the local 
rising in the Vendee, the second to parry the 
disjointed blows of a cosmopolitan conspiracy. 
Concessions upon the point of religion had 
already brought peace within sight in the 
west before Napoleon returned from Egypt, 
and to him, therefore, belong the finishing 
touches only in the work of conciliation and 
disarmament. The grand achievement of 
stilling a struggle characterised throughout 
by singular ferocity was unfortunately stained 
by the shadow of a crime. Frotte, the most 
intrepid and obstinate of the royalist leaders, 
coming into Alengon under a safe-conduct, 
was seized, put to the judgment of a military 
tribunal, and shot with all his staff: we can- 
not prove an order from Napoleon, but we 
know that the officer who thus stained the 
military honour of his country never received 
a reprimand. 

The pacification of the Vendee in 1800 was 
a truce rather than a settlement. As it be- 
came increasingly clear that Napoleon was in 
no humour to play the role of General Monk, 
the desperadoes of the royalist party plotted 
his removal by violent means. The centre 
of the conspiracy — which was in effect mur- 
der under the flimsiest disguise — was the 
Count of Artois, that prince of the blood 
whose cowardice, folly and superstition were 



92 NAPOLEON 

evidenced in a long career as dishonourable to 
himself as it was disastrous to his friends. His 
principal agents and accomplices were Gen- 
eral Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland, and 
Georges Cadoudal, a typical Chouan hero, 
who had risked his burly form and bull-neck 
too often in the ambuscades and melees of the 
west to shrink from the crowning peril of an 
armed affray with Napoleon's escort. But 
like all conspiracies of a wide design, the 
scheme was difficult of execution. Before 
Georges and his Chouans had landed in 
France the threads of the affair were in the 
hands of Napoleon's police. They knew how 
it was intended to kill or take the First Con- 
sul in an open melee, and how it was hoped 
that Moreau, the most famous of the generals 
who regretted the advance of despotism, 
might thereupon be induced to come forward 
and restore the monarchy. The conspirators, 
real or assumed, were taken and put upon 
their trial. For Georges and his twelve hardy 
fellows death was no unexpected or unmerited 
retribution. Pichegru died in prison, prob- 
ably by his own hand. The evidence against 
Moreau proved him to be the friend of Piche- 
gru, not the accomplice of Georges, but the 
Pompey of the French Revolution was 
nevertheless sentenced to imprisonment and 
then banished to America by the grace of 
his victorious rival. 

So far, despite the boiling up of fierce 
passions, royalist and republican, things had 
gone smoothly for Napoleon. He had been 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 93 

greatly wronged. His splendid services to 
France had been requited by a base and 
dastardly conspiracy. He had taken a suf- 
ficient but not an excessive revenge. But 
at this point in his career he committed the 
crime which was worse than a blunder, and 
the blunder which was worse than a crime. 
It came out from the trial of Cadoudal that 
a royal prince was expected in Paris to give 
a lead to the affair. The police suspected 
the Due d'Enghien, a young man then re- 
siding at Ettenheim in Baden, just across 
the French frontier, and falsely reported 
to be in communication with the traitor 
Dumouriez. Napoleon ordered his arrest, 
his trial and his death. At five o'clock on 
the evening of March 20, 1804, the prince was 
brought to Vincennes, and at eleven o'clock 
put upon his trial. At half -past two in the 
following morning, with the ink still wet 
upon his sentence, the last of the Condes, 
erect, fearless and innocent, was taken out 
into the moat, shot down and thrown into 
a grave which had been prepared before the 
officers of the court had completed their 
hollow inquiry. 

In this extraordinary act of precipitate 
violence Napoleon was governed by a mixture 
of passion and statecraft. Long before the 
prince had reached Paris, the evidence which 
had given rise to the first suspicions of the 
police was known to be baseless. The prince 
was a frank enemy, no secret conspirator. 
He had nothing to do with the plot of which 



94 NAPOLEON 

he disapproved. He was not in communi- 
cation with Dumouriez. His residence near 
the French frontier was correctly explained 
by the two cardinal passions of well-born 
youth, courtship and the chase. Yet knowing 
his innocence, Napoleon decided that he must 
be shot, as a warning to the Bourbon family 
and their supporters no further to dabble in 
conspiracy. "These people," he said on the 
evening of the execution, "wish to slay the 
Revolution in my person; it is my duty to 
defend and avenge it. We have left behind 
the age of etiquette. I have shed blood. It 
was my duty. I shall shed more perhaps in 
future." The speed and secrecy with which 
the affair was carried through stifled the 
monitions of conscience and abridged the ap- 
peals of his household. It also added to the 
awful impressiveness of the lesson. No prince 
of the blood ever afterwards attempted to 
plot Napoleon's murder, princes even having 
learnt, by this example, how sharp and swift 
was a Corsican vendetta. The avenger too 
paid his price, as we learn from those who 
watched him at the crisis and have reported 
how a mind, big with impending crime, be- 
comes sombre, irritable and defiant, chafes 
against itself and conceives a wrathful sus- 
picion of the world. 

The day which opened with this tragedy 
is memorable in the history of France for the 
passage into law of the Civil Code. This 
famous monument of jurisprudence realised 
the desire, entertained as far back as the fif- 



THE ORGANISATION OF FRANCE 95 

teenth century and passionately held during 
the French Revolution, for the priceless boon 
of legal unity. The members of Napoleon's 
Council of State worked upon the basis of 
five draft codes prepared but never executed 
by the revolutionary assemblies. But if the 
idea of a single code, brief, clear and humane, 
is not original with Napoleon, to him belongs 
the credit of execution. A period of revo- 
lution, when divisions are sharp and beliefs 
mutable and unsettled, is not well adapted 
for the task of codification. The golden 
moment arrives when the storms have cleared 
away and the grand features of the legal 
landscape stand out in clear outline. Napo- 
leon seized the occasion. His Code embodies 
the permanent conquests, while rejecting the 
temporary extravagances of the French Revo- 
lution. It is founded upon the principles 
of toleration and equity. It acknowledges 
divorce and civil marriage. There is no 
clearer statement of the sanctity of private 
property or of the binding value of family life. 
Critics have assailed the Civil Code as a 
rapid and superficial structure, as a pocket- 
handbook indicating some general legal 
principles, but far from exhausting the 
casuistry of life or precluding the growth of 
a jungle of case law. The task to which 
modern Germans have devoted fifteen years 
of exhausting effort, Napoleon dared to ac- 
complish in four months. His temerity has 
been censured. Yet, however imperfect the 
Civil Code may be, it is better than no code at 



96 NAPOLEON 

all; and had the work not been done when 
and as it was, France might be codeless to 
this day. A single law is better than two 
hundred customs, equality is better than 
privilege. In the compass of a little volume 
which may be read and understood by every 
man and woman in the country, the Civil 
Code depicts the outlines of a civilised and 
democratic society, adjusting the great body 
of revolutionary enactment to the old and 
inveterate traditions of the race. 

In the work of discussion and draftsman- 
ship Napoleon took a prominent part. "He 
spoke," says Thibaudeau, "without embar- 
rassment and without pretension. He was 
never inferior to any member of the Council : 
he often equalled the ablest of them by the 
ease with which he seized the point of a 
question, by the justice of his ideas and the 
force of his reasoning; he often surpassed 
them by the turn of his phrases and the 
originality of his expression." He picked up 
law, as the hawk its food, in the intervals of 
flight. A copy of the Institutes or of Domat 
devoured in the guard-room at Valence, a 
treatise or two snatched during an Italian 
campaign, some evening talks with Tronchet 
and Portalis, the thirty-five long debates in 
Council, — such was the source and sum of his 
legal equipment. There is, however, no real 
mystery about law. Bad law may be obscure 
and difficult, but good law is organised com- 
mon sense. Napoleon applied to the problems 
of law a grand natural intelligence. He did 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 97 

not view the code from the angle of the legal 
profession or ask himself how a new rule 
would affect the habits and emoluments of the 
legal class. He stood upon the platform of the 
public interest. He was free alike from the 
prejudices of the Churchman, to whom di- 
vorce was anathema, and from those of the 
revolutionary, who in the name of freedom 
would make it as easy to change a wife as a 
lodging. Certain things he stood for in 
virtue of a deep natural instinct fortified by 
experience — the subjection of woman, the 
power of the father, a regulated system of 
divorce, the sanctity of private property. 
The Feminist and Socialist parties of to-day 
will therefore find little to applaud in the 
legal work of Napoleon; nor would he have 
courted their commendation. The Civil 
Code belongs to the category not of socialist 
but of liberal documents, and its importance 
in the history of civilisation lies in the fact 
that it registers and perpetuates the vast 
social improvements introduced into Europe 
by the French Revolution. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 

The civil achievements of the Consulate, 
the most dazzling of their kind in the history 
of Europe, occupied but a part of Napoleon's 
energy. The four years which in the domestic 
history of France are marked by the pacifica- 



98 NAPOLEON 

tion of the Vendee, the Church settlement, 
and the Civil Code, which witnessed the ele- 
vation of France from a state of chaos and 
distraction to an unparalleled level of pros- 
perity, are also years of crowded diplomacy 
and brilliant conquests, of far-reaching plans 
of colonial empire and restless machinations 
to extend French influence in Europe. The 
policy of aggression was not the invention of 
Napoleon, but the bequest of the Revolution- 
ary Government. Long before the coup 
d'etat of Brumaire the diplomatists of the 
Republic had conceived of their great de- 
mocracy as girdled with a ring of republican 
satellites, and as exercising by virtue of its 
energy and the natural seduction of its insti- 
tutions an overwhelming influence on Europe. 
They regarded Belgium and Savoy as inte- 
gral parts of France; Holland and Switzer- 
land as natural appendages; and Italy as the 
appointed theatre of revolution to be con- 
ducted on the French model and in the French 
interests. The arrogance of this diplomacy 
had been duly supported by arms; and for a 
few months in the early part of 1799 the 
French had not only secured the Rhine fron- 
tier, but had also divided the Italian penin- 
sula into satellite republics. Then, while 
Napoleon was still absent in Egypt, the tide 
began to turn. A new coalition was formed 
on the Continent, and while the armies of 
Austria successfully ejected the French from 
Italy, an Anglo-Russian expedition was dis- 
patched to the shores of Holland. 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 99 

Napoleon's return from Egypt was not, 
as has been sometimes assumed, the first 
gleam of light in a dark horizon. The most 
pressing danger had been already averted by 
victories won at Zurich by Massena and in 
Holland by Brune; and before Napoleon had 
stepped upon the quay of Frejus, Suvaroff, 
the one living commander whose military 
intuition might have rivalled his own, was 
executing a retreat through the snows of 
Switzerland. Even if Napoleon had been 
drowned at sea, France would probably have 
been able to preserve the Rhine frontier, and 
with it that ascendancy in Europe which she 
lost at the fall of the Empire and has never 
since been able to regain. But the signifi- 
cance of Napoleon's sudden intrusion lies in 
the fact that the natural frontier was not 
enough for him. No peace would satisfy his 
ambition which did not at least restore to 
France that control of northern Italy which 
had been the fruit of his early victories and 
the substance of the peace of Campo-Formio. 
Such a programme could not be imposed upon 
Powers like Austria and England save at the 
point of the sword, and the proffers of peace 
which upon his assumption of power the 
First Consul addressed to George III and 
Francis II were designed with a view to 
exploring the ground and to deceiving the 
public, rather than with any serious expecta- 
tion that peace would ensue. Nevertheless a 
small portion of posterity has discovered in 
these admirable epistles the soul of a peace- 



100 k NAPOLEON 

lover; and in every generation Bonapartist 
writers have been found to argue that the 
most pacific of rulers was drawn into a long 
course of war and conquest by malignant 
antagonists and inexorable fate. 

Though the coalition had been seriously 
weakened by the withdrawal of Russia, the 
military situation at the beginning of 1800 
was by no means favourable to France. In 
Germany indeed the French and Austrian 
forces were evenly balanced, for the armies of 
Moreau and Kray which faced each other on 
the Lower Rhine amounted to 1^0,000 men; 
but in Italy the French were at a grave dis- 
advantage, for while Melas had an army 
80,000 strong in Piedmont, Massena, who 
was posted on the Riviera, had 30,000 only 
under his command. It was therefore not 
unlikely that while Kray and Moreau bal- 
anced each other in Germany, the frontier of 
Provence would be pierced by an Austrian 
army co-operating with an English fleet and 
counting upon the assistance of the Provencal 
royalists. 

The most complete way of countering such 
an attack would be a crushing French victory 
on the Rhine. If Kray were annihilated in 
Southern Germany the road to Vienna would 
be open to the French, and the Austrians 
would probably be compelled to evacuate all 
their advanced positions in Italy. Indeed, 
as Napoleon afterwards observed, "In this 
campaign the frontier of Germany is the 
decisive point, the littoral of Genoa a second- 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 101 

ary one." In accordance with these views 
Napoleon, having collected a reserve army 
equally prepared to assist Massena and 
Moreau, originally decided for the German 
field of operations. His plan was simple and 
grandiose. He would cross the Rhine at 
Schaffhausen, suddenly throw himself with 
a superior force upon Kray's left flank and 
rear, cut his communications, push him back 
on the Rhine and annihilate his army as 
the Turks were annihilated at Aboukir. 
When this was done, he would march on 
Vienna and dictate a peace in the Austrian 
capital. 

An obstacle of a personal nature caused the 
withdrawal of this scheme. Moreau felt 
himself too great to act as Napoleon's sub- 
ordinate and was too famous to be dismissed. 
It was therefore decided in the first week of 
March that the reserve army should be 
thrown not into Germany but into Italy, and 
that while Moreau covered his rear and left 
flank by an offensive movement south of the 
Danube, Napoleon should strike across 
Switzerland, and catching Melas on flank and 
rear at once relieve the pressure on Massena, 
and compel the Austrians to a retreat which 
would certainly be precipitate, and would 
probably be disastrous. The manner in 
which this daring plan was carried out, the 
secrecy, the dispatch, the detailed finish of 
the arrangements, have deservedly received 
the applause of posterity, and the seven days' 
passage of the St. Bernard over a fair road 



102 NAPOLEON 

and in the month of May, though far from 
being the most difficult, is one of the most 
famous exploits of Napoleon. A matter 
which more vividly illustrates the military 
genius of Napoleon than the successful and 
uncontested passage of a well-known Alpine 
pass is the simple originality of his general 
design and the rapidity with which particular 
parts of it were altered to suit changing 
circumstances. Thus he originally thought 
of crossing the Splugen, but, partly owing to 
Moreau's inaction and partly owing to the 
intelligence that the Austrians were engaged 
with Massena, decided for the St. Bernard, 
which is 140 miles to the west. Again, once 
across the pass it was his first intention to 
march straight upon Melas. But arriving 
at Ivrea on May 26, he learnt that Massena 
was still holding out at Genoa, and in the 
elation of success substituted for the original 
plan, which would have allowed his adversary 
a line of retreat, the more ambitious scheme 
of a march on Milan, a conquest of Lombardy 
and a seizure of the passages on the middle 
Po. Military critics are divided upon the 
question, whether it is not the first duty of 
the commander of a relieving army to march 
to the guns of a beleaguered fortress. Genoa 
after an heroic defence capitulated on June 4, 
and Napoleon has been blamed for not avert- 
ing the catastrophe. But the weight of ex- 
pert opinion is in favour of the plan which he 
pursued. The business of a commander is 
to destroy his enemy rather than to help his 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 103 

friends. By throwing his army across the 
line of Melas' communications Napoleon 
adopted a course which, had Genoa not been 
eating its last crust, would either have drawn 
the besieging army from its walls or have 
exposed the Austrian commander to certain 
destruction at the hands of an army far more 
numerous than his own. In war, success or 
failure is often ultimately a matter of imagina- 
tion, and the sudden apparition of Napoleon 
in the capital of Lombardy exercised a moral 
effect over the whole of Italy which may well 
have been worth the delay which it involved. 
In spite of this brilliant prelude the battle 
of Marengo (June 14, 1800), which crowns 
the campaign, is memorable as an instance 
of the errors into which the greatest general 
may fall through an overdrawn contempt for 
his enemy. So poorly did Napoleon think of 
the elderly gentleman opposed to him, that, 
disregarding his own cardinal maxims of war, 
he started for Alexandria, upon which the 
Austrians were concentrating, with a force 
not exceeding 34,000 men. Even these 
numbers were regarded as an excessive com- 
pliment to the enemy, and in the course of 
the French advance westward 6000 men were 
shed to guard Cremona and Piacenza, while 
another division under the command of the 
brilliant Desaix was detached to head off a 
possible retreat to Genoa. Upon the assump- 
tion that the main body of the Austrians could 
make no serious resistance, it was good strat- 
egy to beset every possible avenue of escape; 



104 NAPOLEON 

but the Austrian is a stubborn fighter, and the 
prowess of the white-coats on the plain of the 
Bormida showed the danger of making ar- 
rangements for a capture until you have 
effectually secured a defeat. The battle, 
which began at daybreak, was in its earlier 
stages so disastrous to the French that at one 
o'clock Melas rode back into Alexandria in 
the full belief that the day was won and that 
the finishing touches of the pursuit could be 
delegated to subordinates. Slowly and surely, 
with many rallies, the French were pushed 
eastward along the road to San Giuliano, and 
the rout seemed to have degenerated into a 
stampede, when about four o'clock in the 
afternoon Desaix suddenly appeared on the 
scene. He had heard the guns, and with the 
instinct of a soldier had marched to the sound 
without delay. His arrival was the beginning 
of a rally which converted a disaster into a 
triumph as decisive as any in military annals. 
Napoleon was in the village full of resource, 
energy and inspiration. " Children," he cried, 
"remember that it is my habit to sleep on 
the field of battle." The men of Desaix's 
division broke into a charge, supported by 
the cavalry of Kellermann and the guns of 
Marmont. Staggered by the unexpected 
shock the great Austrian column stopped, 
reeled and was thrown back in utter confusion 
across the Bormida. Napoleon slept on the 
field of battle; so too did Desaix, but his 
was the sleep of the dead. In the dispatch 
which records the vulgar trophies of victory, 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 105 

the fifteen flags, the forty guns, the 8000 
prisoners, the 6000 dead, the First Consul 
spares a paragraph of genuine lament for the 
heroic comrade of his Egyptian war. He 
owed him much, for so shaken was the 
adversary that on the next day Melas signed 
an armistice, surrendering all Italy west of 
the Mincio to the military occupation of the 
French. 

The first political result of this amazing 
campaign was to give to the Consular Govern- 
ment, while it was still a new and untried 
experiment, exciting many murmurs and 
misgivings, that kind of overwhelming pres- 
tige which not only silences cavil, but against 
which even well-founded criticism is at a 
serious disadvantage. Its second result was 
to restore the French ascendancy in Italy and 
to prepare the way for a peace with Austria. 
Yet since Austria was closely linked with the 
obstinate power of England, and as yet 
unbeaten in Germany, she was not prepared 
to accept Marengo as a compelling motive 
to a humiliating peace. After a period of 
international negotiation, conducted with ex- 
treme dexterity on the French side, hostilities 
were resumed on the Continent and brought 
to a climax on a wintry December day in one 
of those forest tracts which are characteristic 
of Bavaria. Moreau's'victory at Hohenlinden 
(December 3, 1800) so fortified the argument 
grounded on Marengo, that the peace for 
which France was searching, and which it 
was the business of Austria, if possible, to 



106 NAPOLEON 

avert, was on February 9, 1801, concluded at 
Luneville. Again the proud dynasty of the 
Hapsburgs recognised the conquest by France 
of Belgium, the Rhine frontier and Savoy. 
Again it accepted the Batavian, Helvetic and 
Cisalpine Republics; and again the Holy 
Roman Emperor consented to an internal 
revolution in Germany in order that a govern- 
ment made possible by regicide and revolution 
might secure its ill-gotten gains. The Treaty 
of Luneville restores the situation which had 
been won at Campo-Formio with some modi- 
fications all unfavourable to Austria. Never 
since the great days of Louis XIV had a 
French diplomatist affixed his signature to a 
peace so glorious and therefore so unstable. 

A different method was necessarily pursued 
in dealing with the other limb of the anti- 
Gallican league. Since the French navy was 
not in a sufficient state of preparedness to 
encourage a direct invasion, Napoleon set 
himself to contrive a continental coalition 
against England. Of this immense con- 
federacy the principal member was to be 
Paul I, the mad autocrat of Russia, who 
having taken a sudden umbrage against the 
government of George III on the inadequate 
ground that it had captured Malta, was 
prepared to acquiesce in suggestions, however 
extravagant, for promoting his new and 
whimsical aversion. In Napoleon's eyes the 
value of such an alliance bore no propor- 
tion to the stability of the Tsar's character 
and intelligence. "Russia," he observed on 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 107 

January 2, 1801, "holds the key of Asia." 
Russia's help might enable him to conquer 
India, to hold Egypt, to take a share of the 
Balkans; more directly still, through the 
league of Northern Powers recently organised 
by the Tsar to dispute the British maritime 
law, it might shatter the commercial pros- 
perity of England. Round this central under- 
standing with the Tsar, and through him 
with the maritime Powers of Denmark, 
Prussia and Sweden, were grouped a number 
of complementary negotiations and alliances. 
The weak government of Naples was com- 
pelled to exclude English goods and to suffer 
a French army of occupation to be quartered 
upon its territory until such time as the 
French troops could be transhipped to Egypt; 
and Spain was coerced into a similar act of 
compliance. In return for Tuscany, the cor- 
rupt and feeble Government of Charles IV 
bound itself not only to sell Louisiana to 
Napoleon, but to invade unoffending Portu- 
gal, in order that England might be robbed 
of her last ally and most faithful customer 
among the continental Powers. 

The same spring which saw the creation 
witnessed the sudden dissolution of this 
extraordinary confederacy. On March 24, 
Paul was murdered in St. Petersburg and the 
linch-pin fell out of the whole machine. At 
the same time unpleasant reminders rained 
down upon Napoleon of the awkward effects 
of a navy controlled by a "nation of shop- 
keepers." On March 20, Abercromby won 



108 NAPOLEON 

a decisive victory in Egypt. On April 2, 
Nelson destroyed the Danish fleet at Copen- 
hagen. The First Consul saw, or affected to 
see, a connecting thread between the ex- 
plosives which had missed him in Paris, the 
entry of a British fleet into the Sound, and 
the murder of the Tsar. "The English," 
he observed bitterly, "missed me on 3 Nivose, 
they have not missed me at St. Petersburg." 
Nevertheless he was impelled by the failure 
of his diplomatic combinations to contem- 
plate a peace with the government of as- 
sassins. It was clearly to his interest, at 
whatever temporary sacrifice of ambition, to 
obtain such a respite as would enable him to 
repair that fatal deficiency in ships which had 
lost him Malta and Egypt and twice sheltered 
his active enemy from invasion. Nothing 
effectual could be done without a navy, for 
the league of the Continent against England 
had broken down. The new Tsar Alexander 
had accommodated the differences which 
divided Russia and England, the league of 
Neutrals was dissolved, and though Portugal 
had been coerced into the exclusion of Eng- 
lish goods, the Spaniards had deeply offended 
the First Consul by the lack of spirit which 
they had thrown into the invasion and by 
their impertinent readiness to conclude a 
peace. So on October 1, 1801, preliminaries 
of a treaty between France and England were 
signed in London. 

Five months later these preliminaries 
ripened into the Peace of Amiens. The in- 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 109 

terval was employed by Napoleon not in 
disarming the suspicions of his adversary, 
but in piling up fresh evidence of his enter- 
prise and power. Even the keenest Whig 
who followed Fox into the lobbies could not 
help acknowledging that the philanthropy 
of Fox's hero did not belong to the Quaker 
type. He had annexed Piedmont in April, 
had tightened his hold over the Dutch in Sep- 
tember, had constituted an Italian republic 
(covering the same ground as the old Cisal- 
pine) with himself as omnipotent President in 
January. From the heel of Italy to the Hook 
of Holland French troops were quartered 
upon alien populations, and alien subsidies 
were pouring into the French treasury. Nor 
was the First Consul's activity confined to 
Europe. He had extracted an addition to 
French Guiana from Portugal, and dispatched 
a powerful army to recover San Domingo 
from the negroes. It was plain that he in- 
tended to win an empire in the West to 
balance his exclusion from Egypt and Syria. 
By the Treaty of Amiens England aban- 
doned all her colonial conquests save Ceylon 
and Trinidad, surrendered Malta to the 
Knights, restored Minorca to Spain, and 
dropped the royal title of France, which ever 
since Edward III had been used by the 
English kings. To balance these concessions 
Napoleon agreed to evacuate Egypt, which 
he could not hold, Naples, which he could 
always conquer, and Portugal, which had 
only incurred his animosity as the passive 



110 NAPOLEON 

ally of an enemy. Accepted from the first 
with recrimination in England, the peace was 
based upon foundations the instability of 
which became more evident as every week 
revealed new glimpses of Napoleon's restless 
ambitions. To English critics the treaty 
seemed to surrender far more than any 
British statesman had any right to concede, 
and to ignore points upon which it was the 
duty of every patriot to insist. It surrendered 
the Cape and Martinique; it made no protest 
against a French Piedmont, a French Lom- 
bardy and a French Holland. Such an 
arrangement of the world, even if it could 
ever be made palatable to British ideas, was 
only to be tolerated if it were accompanied 
by no further aggravations. The ordinary 
Englishman did not understand the meaning 
of a peace which involved no relaxation of 
commercial duties, no slackening of military 
preparations, and no intermission of colonial 
designs. In Napoleon's refusal to consent 
to a commercial treaty he read an obvious 
desire to weaken the industrial strength of 
the island. He could not understand how 
any country could be the true ally of Great 
Britain which treated British goods as if they 
were the tainted product of some plague- 
stricken ghetto. He distrusted the San 
Domingo expedition and the Louisiana trans- 
fer. He believed that peace had been 
accepted by Bonaparte with the sole design 
of building a navy capable of wresting from 
England her colonies in India and America, 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 111 

and of transporting an army to her shores, 
and when he read in his newspaper that the 
First Consul had been giving a constitution 
to the Swiss or that he had sent a colonel 
to the Levant upon a political and military 
mission, he thought that his worst suspicions 
had been abundantly confirmed. 

In the calm evening of his life Napoleon 
would speak with regret of the British 
perversity which had stood between Europe 
and "moral regeneration." Yet however 
much he might profess his pacific intentions 
at St. Helena, the idea of a stable and perma- 
nent peace was never in his mind. He had 
never for a moment abandoned the project 
of recovering Egypt, of founding a French 
power in India, and of shaking the maritime 
ascendancy of England. In common with the 
short-lived League of Neutrals, he held that 
it was essential to the progress of civilisation 
that Great Britain should be forced to aban- 
don her claim to search neutral vessels for 
enemies' goods and to seize neutral vessels 
trading with enemies' ports. He had always 
been a strong Protectionist, holding that agri- 
culture is more valuable than manufacture, 
manufactures than commerce, and being in- 
clined to set no bounds to the power which a 
government may exert in educating new indus- 
tries. He was therefore violently opposed to a 
commercial treaty with England, or to any 
concession to the "idealogues" of Free Trade. 
An autocrat himself, and a past master in the 
art of disciplining the Press to compliance 



in NAPOLEON 

with autocracy, he could not understand and 
he bitterly resented the libellous freedom of 
the London pamphleteer. Already his ideal 
of Europe as revealed in his chance conversa- 
tion and correspondence differed widely from 
any which British statesmen could entertain. 
He regarded the Mediterranean as strictly 
belonging to the Latin Powers, in other words 
to France, exercising a constant and guiding 
pressure upon the dependent peninsulas of 
Italy and Spain. He thought of Germany as 
an uncouth federation of venal governments, 
already more than half enfeoffed to France, 
and destined in an increasing measure to 
enjoy the benefits of French direction. 
Having composed by a brilliant act of states- 
manship the intestine feuds of her democrats 
and federalists, he viewed Switzerland as a 
satellite. And it belonged to the established 
economy of his State, that while Holland, 
Spain and Genoa should contribute to his 
navy, the honour of supporting the army of 
France should be liberally distributed among 
her allies and dependents. 

Such then being Napoleon's general outlook 
upon the politics of Europe the resumption 
of the war could not have been long deferred. 
But to say that a war is inevitable at some 
time does not imply that the time is indiffer- 
ent. Napoleon had everything to gain by 
delay. The conquest of San Domingo, the 
settlement of Louisiana, not to speak of ulte- 
rior plans of colonial development, depended 
upon the quiescence of the English fleet until 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 113 

such time as the shipwrights of Antwerp, 
Brest and Toulon should have brought the 
French navy to a level with its rival. It is 
therefore a blot upon Napoleon's prudence, 
firstly, that he should have embarked upon a 
great overseas' enterprise before his navy had 
been adequately strengthened ; and secondly, 
that while the fortune of that expedition was 
in suspense, he should have supplied provo- 
cations to the one power capable of completely 
foiling his design. At St. Helena Napoleon 
recognised that the expedition to San Do- 
mingo was a great mistake. He might have 
added that he had been expressly warned 
against the project by the ablest of the local 
experts. It was not a question of recovering a 
rebel colony or of composing a civil war in a 
lucrative possession of the French Republic. 
San Domingo still flew the French flag and ac- 
knowledged the French allegiance. It had, 
moreover, after a frightful period of distrac- 
tion, recently been brought under control by 
the only negro of unmixed blood who has ever 
exhibited the qualities of a statesman. Tous- 
saint l'Ouverture had given to the island the 
three principal constituents of its reviving 
prosperity — a stable supply of black labour on 
the plantations, a free exchange of commerce 
with the mainland of America, and a civil 
service manned by whites. The First Consul 
would have done wisely to pccept his work. 

There is nothing more terrible in the world 
than the colour feeling of America when it 
is fevered by panic or disaster. The white 



114 NAPOLEON 

planters, who had fled from San Domingo in 
the servile war, represented that it was 
intolerable for a great French colony, the 
pearl of all the sugar islands, to be under 
the heel of a sanctimonious negro and his 
formidable array of grinning blacks. And 
since it was equally contrary to Napoleon's 
ideas that a colony of France should presume 
to buy its necessaries from America and its 
luxuries from London, a case was soon made 
out for the destruction of Toussaint. The 
army of San Domingo was entrusted to 
General Leclerc, husband of Pauline Bona- 
parte, and the brother-in-law of Napoleon; 
and since it had served with Moreau on the 
Rhine, it was surmised by the more cynical 
observers of the First Consul's methods that 
the expedition was designed for the banish- 
ment of his domestic opponents. A more cer- 
tain ground for censure is supplied by the se- 
cret instructions given to the General-in-Chief. 
Leclerc was commanded to cajole, trap and 
deport the dictator and his generals, to 
destroy the negro army, and then to restore 
slavery in the eastern part of the island. 
The first part of the programme was accom- 
plished; and having been seized by an act 
of execrable treachery, Toussaint was sent 
to die among the icy blasts of the Jura. His 
tragedy, which inspired Wordsworth with a 
famous sonnet, brought no luck to its con- 
triver. The yellow fever swooped down like 
an avenging spirit upon the brilliant army of 
San Domingo, and had reduced it to a help- 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 115 

less and miserable fragment when the reopen- 
ing of the war with England abruptly closed 
the western world to Napoleon's ambition. 

The peace was broken upon the point of 
Malta. To England, preoccupied above all 
things with India, it seemed to be a vital 
necessity that this small island in the Medi- 
terranean with its noble harbour and splendid 
fortress should on no account be liable to a 
second seizure by the French. By the terms 
of the treaty the independence of the island 
was to be guaranteed by six great Powers, 
and upon that guarantee being obtained, it 
was to be evacuated by the British troops 
and garrisoned by Neapolitans for a period 
of three years, at the conclusion of which it 
was assumed that the Knights of St. John 
might be able to provide for its defence. If 
Napoleon had consented to intermit his 
designs upon the East, it is safe to assume 
that no difficulties would have arisen with 
regard to Malta. The British troops would 
have been promptly withdrawn, the Neapoli- 
tans would have been replaced, and the treaty 
would have been satisfied in letter and spirit. 
But Napoleon was constitutionally incapable 
of soothing the susceptibilities of his rivals. 
At the very moment when naval and military 
interests demanded a long peace with Eng- 
land, his conduct was so framed as to excite 
the liveliest apprehensions of all the Powers 
who were interested in the eastern littoral of 
the Mediterranean. He spoke to the Tsar of 
the partition of Turkey, and of the Morea as 



116 NAPOLEON 

a territory well-suited to the French. He 
equipped (January 1803) an expedition to 
India. The loss of Egypt and Syria touched 
him so deeply that he wasted no time in 
dispatching a mission to explore the means 
for their recovery. The English government, 
which had already been implored by the Porte 
to hold on to Malta, found in the mission of 
Colonel Sebastiani an additional reason for 
suspecting Napoleon, and when on January 
30, 1803, the report of the mission appeared 
in the Moniteur, depicting the popularity of 
the French in the Levant and the ease with 
which Egypt might be reconquered, the 
Cabinet resolved that Malta must continue 
to be held by English troops until the country 
was reassured as to Egypt and Turkey. We 
need not discuss the technical issues. On 
the face of it England, by refusing to with- 
draw, had violated the treaty. And though 
it might be argued that some of the conditions 
precedent to evacuation had not been exe- 
cuted, England's real justification rests not 
upon technical grounds, but on the fact that 
the unimpeded activity of Napoleon was no 
longer compatible with her place in the 
world. 

To Talleyrand, the French foreign minister 
who was working for peace, the chief obstacle 
appeared to be the wounded amour propre 
of the First Consul. Lord Whit worth, the 
British Ambassador in Paris, reported after 
a two hours' interview that Napoleon talked 
more like a captain of dragoons than as 



THE PRELUDE OF EMPIRE 117 

the head of a great State. Gusts of pride, 
temper and arrogance constantly swept him 
from the even course. In moments of 
equilibrium he would speak of ten years 
of peace as essential to procure the means of 
mastering the ocean; but there were other 
moments, and these not infrequent, when he 
would lash himself up into fury, saying that 
he could call out, if need be, two million 
troops, that he was not afraid of a fight, that 
nothing would induce him to surrender a 
point in the treaty to the arrogant John Bull, 
that the English could do him little harm, 
that they might take a couple of frigates and 
a few colonies, but that he would carry the 
terrors of war to London. "If the first war," 
he remarked in April, "has brought in Bel- 
gium and Piedmont, the second will establish 
our federal system even more securely." 

He was not then afraid of a rupture which 
would lead to fresh conquests on the Conti- 
nent, cover up the San Domingo disaster, and 
give a new turn to the energies of France. By 
a plausible system of casuistry he persuaded 
himself that war and tyranny were essential 
to the stability of a power founded on revolu- 
tion and exposed to the jealousies which are 
engendered by civil strife. "My position," 
he would say, "is entirely different from 
that of the old sovereigns. They can live a 
life of indolence in their castles and surrender 
themselves without shame to every kind of 
vice. Nobody contests their legitimacy, 
nobody thinks of replacing them; nobody 



118 NAPOLEON 

accuses them of being ungrateful, because no- 
body has helped to raise them to the throne. 
Everything is different in my case. There is 
not a general who does not think that he has 
the same right to the throne as I. There 
is not a man who does not believe that he 
shaped my course on the 18th Brumaire. ... 
I am therefore obliged to be very severe to 
these men. . . . Within and without my 
dominion is founded on fear. If I abandoned 
the system I should be immediately de- 
throned." With such ideas fermenting in 
his mind Napoleon, while still with the more 
reasonable part of him desiring to postpone 
the rupture, and even offering some con- 
cessions to England, eagerly pushed on 
preparations for war. 

The great duel of the nineteenth century, 
which was finally closed on the field of Water- 
loo, opened on May 16, 1803. In a superb 
message to the Senate Napoleon spoke of the 
moderation and patience of French diplomacy, 
of the exorbitant claims of England, of the 
justice of his cause and the courage of his 
warriors. His scheme of operations was an 
invasion preceded and supported by a rigor- 
ous exclusion of British merchandise from the 
territory of the Republic and her allies. At 
least he was under no illusions as to the 
magnitude of the struggle in which he was 
now involved. "This war," he said in May, 
"will naturally entail a war on the Continent; 
to meet this I must have upon my side Austria 
or Prussia." And since he reckoned that he 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 119 

could easily win Prussia "by giving her a 
bone to gnaw," and that Russia would be 
"always inactive," he set his plans to face a 
possible struggle with the old enemy whom 
he had twice victoriously confronted amid 
the mountains and plains of Italy. 

England and Austria, Austria and England 
— as in the days of Marlborough and Eugene, 
these Powers were still the inveterate enemies 
of French expansion, the one barring the way 
on the Continent of Europe, the other be- 
setting the ocean pathways to the world 
beyond. 

CHAPTER VI 

THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 

The discovery and punishment of the 
royalist plot in March 1804 hastened the 
completion of a project which had long been 
maturing in Napoleon's mind, and for two 
years at least had been a matter of public 
speculation. The First Consul had never 
been content with a constitution under which 
his office was limited to a term of ten years, 
and his power checked, however slightly, by 
the action of parliamentary bodies. Such a 
position was not adequate to the deserts of 
a man who already aspired to the fame of an 
Alexander, a Charlemagne or a Caesar. Ac- 
cordingly, in 1802, the French people were 
asked to decide whether Napoleon Bonaparte 
should be Consul for life; and the overwhelm- 
ing affirmative of their reply led to a consider- 



120 NAPOLEON 

able extension of his powers. On August 4, 
1802, Napoleon was given the right to name 
his successor, and to fill the Senate with his 
own nominees. And since the Tribunate was 
reduced to fifty members and the electoral 
colleges were named for life, the last vestige 
of freedom was eliminated from the State. 
The new decree was the act of the Senate, a 
body which had been entrusted with the 
special charge of guarding the constitution, 
and was now and henceforth the compliant 
agent of its destruction. Of opposition there 
was no sign, for to facilitate the passage of the 
bill the courtyard and corridors of the Lux- 
emburg Palace were by a characteristic but 
unnecessary measure of precaution filled 
with grenadiers. 

It implied no great change either in the 
state of public opinion or in the mind of 
Bonaparte when in March 1804 the life 
consulate gave way to an hereditary empire. 
Great as was the shock caused by the execution 
of the Due d'Enghien, it was overwhelmed 
by the reflection of the terrible calamities 
in which France would be involved if the 
Head of the State were to fall by the hand of 
an assassin. It should be remembered that 
Napoleon had saved France from anarchy, 
and that he had given her a government 
which by every test that could be applied 
was likely, if not overset by some violent 
catastrophe, to be as stable as it was glorious. 
His life and his life alone stood between 
France and civil war. There were many 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 121 

Frenchmen who deplored the loss of liberty, 
many who regretted the renewal of the war, 
and not a few who had already conceived a 
deep distrust of Napoleon's methods and 
ambitions. But even these, however much 
they were inclined to grumble at tyranny, 
and to find in Moreau their archetype of 
political virtue, had no taste for the renewal 
of the Vendee or the Terror. They felt that 
it was high time that foreign intriguers should 
be instructed that France had, once and for 
all, made election of the government which 
suited her peculiar needs, and that since the 
removal of Napoleon would not alter the 
situation, neither emigre nor terrorist had 
anything to gain by removing him. 

The difficulties attending the foundation of 
the Empire came neither from the French 
people nor from the Chambers, but from the 
inner circle of Napoleon's family. Senate, 
tribunate, legislature were ready to swallow 
the principle of an hereditary autocracy 
which twelve years before had been violently 
discarded; and even in the Council of State, 
so rich in revolutionary characters, there were 
but seven dissentient voices. In the eyes of 
the peasantry, the soldiers and the middle 
class anything was preferable to a new revo- 
lution, or to the disturbance of a settlement 
based on equality. The sole difficulty came 
from the fact that since no children were 
borne by Josephine, the succession to the 
Empire was an open question which could 
not be debated without cabal or closed with- 



122 NAPOLEON 

out heartburning. The three elder brothers 
of Napoleon, all men above the ordinary 
standard of ability, had by this time shot up 
into positions of affluence and splendour; and 
though they differed from one another in 
important points of temperament, Louis be- 
ing as chilly as Lucien was hot, they united 
in the family characteristics of the jealous 
temper and the obstinate will. In deference 
to the strong pressure of Joseph, Napoleon 
abandoned the Roman and congenial plan of 
an unlimited right of adoption. The Imperial 
dignity was not to pass beyond the sacred 
circle of the sons of Letizia, and failing an heir 
to the body of the Emperor, or his adoption 
of a nephew, the crown was to go to Joseph 
and his heirs and then to Louis. Two broth-, 
ers were excluded from the succession, and for 
the same reason. The headstrong Lucien had 
contracted a marriage with a woman of the 
middle class to whom he was deeply attached 
and whom he honourably refused to abandon; 
and Jerome, the Benjamin of the family, had 
been guilty of a similar imprudence. To the 
deep anger of Napoleon, to whom every Bo- 
naparte was now a French prince and a possi- 
ble husband of foreign princesses, the young 
sailor announced that he had been married 
in Baltimore, and that he proposed to return 
to Europe with an American wife. 

A necessary complement to the assumption 
of the Imperial crown was the formation of a 
regular Court and an increased attention to 
etiquette. Polished ladies and gentlemen 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 123 

who were familiar with the easy graces of 
Versailles found a subject for mockery in the 
abrupt manners of the Corsican Emperor and 
the awkward and ignorant movements of his 
satellites. Napoleon had made no sacrifices 
to the graces, and was deficient in all the 
minor arts of the European aristocracy. His 
dancing was clumsy, his horsemanship in- 
different, and he had none of the instincts 
and tastes of a sportsman. Occasionally he 
would follow the hounds, but as a duty owing 
to his station rather than as a pleasure; or 
fire at his wife's tame birds in the garden, 
obeying the same nervous impulse which led 
him to hack chairs and tables with his pen- 
knife and to rend and tear any minor articles 
which might come to his hand. His musical 
taste was rudimentary and untrained. He 
had no care for pictures, nor patience with the 
superfluous delicacies of social intercourse. 
Talleyrand, who had known the finished and 
pleasant courtesies of the ancien regime, said 
that to amuse Napoleon was "amuser l'ina- 
musable," and that the man treated civilisa- 
tion as his personal enemy. The bitter jibe 
gave joy to many a delicate lady, who had 
writhed as the Emperor pulled her ear, or 
maliciously recounted the rumoured infideli- 
ties of her husband. There is nothing more 
devastating to pleasure than a savage and 
intolerant relevance; and the conversation of 
Napoleon, when it was not a brilliant mono- 
logue or a sharp reprimand, was apt to be a 
fatiguing and relevant interrogatory. A court 



124 NAPOLEON 

governed by a laborious egoist may have 
many virtues. It may be economical, it may 
be raised above the influence of female in- 
trigue, it may be filled not by feeble and 
amiable parasites but by the statesmen and 
soldiers of an empire; but it will not be amus- 
ing. And the court of the Empire, which had 
all these merits, as it became more splendid, 
more stiff, more ceremonial, became less 
amusing. At its centre was a man to whom 
the whole apparatus of court-ceremonial — ■ 
the levees, the uniforms, the bowings and the 
scrapings — was merely an instrument of gov- 
ernment, pleasant only as ministering to his 
own sense of power, valuable only as impress- 
ing the ordinary human imagination with the 
dignity which attaches to the Head of the 
State. The conception of a monarch as a be- 
ing whose principal function is to please his 
subjects was quite alien to Napoleon. His 
duty and absorbing pleasure was to rule them, 
and to rule them always. If he played cards 
or chess, he played for victory; if he could 
not win by fair means, he cheated. And the 
spirit of dominion was so much a part of his 
nature that no letters, however private, were 
safe from his inquisition, and that on every 
abatement in the pressure of public affairs, 
he was capable of prescribing to some lady 
of the court the size of her family, or the 
cost of her kitchen and stables. 

This spirit of dominion, so injurious to free 
and pleasant intercourse, was specially exem- 
plified in Napoleon's treatment of his own 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 125 

family. He cherished for his mother, his 
brothers and his sisters a real affection, and 
there is no part of his career more truly 
honourable than the privations which he 
endured in youth, or than the generosity 
which he displayed in manhood that he might 
assist the fortunes of his family. It was part 
of the clan-feeling of the Corsican, part also 
of his own acute punctilio, to see that his 
kinsfolk were duly cared for, and to demon- 
strate to France and to the world that, family 
for family, Bonaparte was better than Bour- 
bon. The foundation of the Empire opened 
out an opportunity larger than any which had 
yet presented itself of demonstrating this 
thesis. The Bourbons had ruled in France, 
and were still ruling in Spain and Naples: a 
stock, primarily French, but by force of dip- 
lomatic and military prudence become the 
symbol of monarchy among the Latin races. 
A destiny no less august might be reserved 
for the sons of Letizia. It would be a fine 
adventure, excellent fun, a beautiful demon- 
stration of how the slow old world may be 
turned inside out by a man of genius, to 
make of them princes, dignitaries, kings in 
an empire as wide as that of Charlemagne. 
But one inexorable condition was attached. 
Promotion could only be purchased and 
station preserved by implicit obedience to 
the head of the family. 

Ever since the declaration of war with 
England Napoleon had been engaged in 
preparing for an invasion. "The Channel," 



126 NAPOLEON 

he said, "is a ditch which needs but a pinch 
of courage to cross." And once crossed he 
reckoned that England would be at his feet. 
Talking afterwards at St. Helena, he said 
that four days would have brought him to 
London, that he would have entered the Eng- 
lish capital "not as a conqueror but as a 
liberator, a second William III, but more 
generous and disinterested than he"; and 
that after proclaiming a Republic he would 
have dissolved the Peers, reformed the Com- 
mons and distributed the wealth of the patri- 
otic aristocracy among the poor. The canaille 
would have welcomed him; he would have 
promised "everything" to the sailors; a sepa- 
rate Republic would have been set up in 
Ireland; and so the two islands, the one 
repressed by an alien race, the other by a 
tyrannous oligarchy, would have shared the 
regeneration of France. 

No value can be attached to these gascon- 
ades. Had England been really conquered 
by Napoleon there is no reason to doubt that 
her fate would have been similar to that of 
Prussia after Jena, that she would have been 
bled white by French tax-collectors, that she 
would have been saddled with an army of 
occupation, and that at no very short interval 
tax-collectors and soldiers would have been 
driven out of the country by a national ris- 
ing. A distinguished military writer from the 
Continent gives it as his opinion that it was 
a misfortune for Europe that the tricolour 
never waved over the Tower of London and 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 127 

Windsor Castle, arguing that if Napoleon had 
conquered England, his power to damage the 
Continent would have been proportionately 
weakened, and that England would never 
have been able to acquire that colonial mo- 
nopoly which not unnaturally exasperates her 
continental rivals. It is not perhaps a wild 
paradox to argue that if a French army had 
landed in England, the ascendancy of Napo- 
leon in Europe would have been terminated 
sooner than actually proved to be the case; 
though a great preponderance of argument 
is on the other side. But history cannot 
doubt that it was better for the progress of 
the world that the greatest share of the colo- 
nies should have come under the control of a 
power believing in political and industrial 
freedom, rather than of a power or combina- 
tion of powers practising monopoly. Nor is 
there any reason for thinking that, however 
much crippled England might have been by 
Napoleon, she would not have been able at 
his fall so rapidly to recover her commerce 
and marine as to outstrip in the race of 
colonial dominion countries whose interests 
were still exclusively or mainly fixed on the 
continent of Europe. The downfall of Eng- 
land in 1804 or 1805 might have been the 
means of restoring Ceylon and the Cape to 
the Dutch, but it would not have contributed 
a year to the life or an acre to the size of the 
colonial empire of Germany. 

For the invasion of England there are three 
prime essentials — a powerful army, an ade- 



128 NAPOLEON 

quate system of transports, and a navy suffi- 
ciently strong to protect the passage and 
disembarkation of the troops. Of these essen- 
tials none were easy to provide, but the first 
was easier than the second, and the second 
than the third. In virtue of the conscription 
and the ruthless operations of the prefects 
who enforced it, Napoleon was able between 
May 1803 and May 1805 to raise an army of 
210,000 men. The operation was painful and 
its results were at first far from satisfying. 
"A fifth of the conscription," said the Em- 
peror, "is composed of the scum of the 
nation." By degrees this army of conscripts, 
drawn mainly from the poor of the towns 
and from the honest folk of the country, was 
hammered into shape by its able and experi- 
enced officers, in the great camps of exercise 
which were established along the coasts of 
the North Sea and the Channel; and it would 
have been easy for Napoleon at any time in 
1804 or 1805 to have dispatched to the shores 
of Kent a striking force of 100,000 men, as 
hardy and expert as any corps which served 
in the wars of that age. 

To furnish adequate transport for such an 
army was a matter of greater difficulty. 
Orders were issued in May for 210, in July 
for 1410, in August for 2000 flat-bottomed 
boats, and a vigorous effort was made to im- 
press upon the people of France the desira- 
bility of voluntary contributions. But apart 
from the impossibility of building so great a 
number of vessels, without blocking all work 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 129 

upon the men of war, there was the extreme 
unlikelihood that they could be convoyed 
from the ports of building to the port of de- 
parture without grievous loss from English 
cruisers. Napoleon's estimate of what could 
be done was greatly in excess of what was 
actually accomplished. The number of craft 
of all kinds collected in the neighbourhood of 
Boulogne never reached 1500, and though 
the harbour of Boulogne had been enlarged, 
it was still far too small to admit of an em- 
barkation on less than five or six tides. 

Inadequate and vulnerable as these pro- 
visions were, it was the lack of the third 
essential which proved the fatal flaw in the 
enterprise. In the autumn of 1803 Napoleon 
seems to have thought that he might slip 
across the Channel, on some dark still night, 
with little or no assistance from a protecting 
fleet. Such a scheme was an invitation to 
disaster. It took no account of the perplex- 
ing tides of the Channel, of the narrow exit of 
Boulogne, and of the difficulty of keeping to- 
gether a great mass of vessels, mostly keelless, 
should a breeze spring up in the night. Even 
if, according to the design then sketched out, 
a Dutch fleet had sailed with transports from 
the Texel and a French fleet had dashed out 
from the Breton harbours to raise war in 
Ireland, the flotilla would have been helpless 
without an escort of men-of-war. Napoleon 
came to see that the necessary preliminary 
to success was a naval concentration in the 
Channel. If he could collect in the narrow 



130 NAPOLEON 

straits a French fleet which for a space of a 
few days was stronger than any English fleet 
which could be brought against it, then the 
flotilla would pass. But it was just here that 
the difficulty lay. The French fleet, greatly 
inferior in calibre and numbers to the British, 
was widely scattered through the Mediter- 
ranean, the Biscay and the Channel ports. 
The largest contingent was blockaded in 
Brest harbour, night and day, winter and 
summer, foul weather and fair weather, by 
that inflexible sailor Admiral Cornwallis, and 
though so exact a system of surveillance was 
no part of his plan, Nelson was in attendance 
on the Toulon squadron. Confronted by this 
perplexing situation, only to be resolved if the 
English admirals could be drawn off from 
their proper work and enticed into distant 
waters, Napoleon showed the fertility and 
daring of a great naval strategist. Feints to 
Egypt, to Ireland, to the West Indies, the 
bringing of the Toulon fleet into Cherbourg 
harbour past Cornwallis and his blockaders 
after a series of feints on a gigantic scale — his 
profuse plots bewilder with their ingenuity 
and air of confidence. In an age of steam, and 
with the help of bold admirals and expert 
sailors, some of these plans might have been 
executed with precision; but Napoleon asked 
too much of a deficient and crestfallen service, 
and forgot that the tides and winds do not 
manoeuvre to the word of command. 

It has sometimes been alleged that all these 
elaborate schemes and combinations were 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 131 

themselves feints, and that Napoleon never 
intended to cross the Channel. Nobody who 
has read the vast, minute and eager corre- 
spondence which for three years revolves 
round the naval problem can for a moment, 
doubt but that Napoleon was in earnest in his 
designs for the invasion of England, or that 
he intended to carry out the project on at 
least two occasions in the autumn of 180S, in 
the summer of 1804, and most probably also 
in the spring and summer of 1805. If the 
plan was never serious, why was a medal 
ordered to be struck representing Hercules 
strangling a mermaid and bearing the legend 
Descente en Angleterre, frappe a Londres 1801^9 
Or why did the Emperor spend five weeks on 
the north coast in the summer of 1804, throw- 
ing the whole weight of his fiery energy into 
the naval preparations, and taking a strange 
exhilaration and excitement from the move- 
ment of the sea? If nothing serious were 
intended it is difficult to believe that twenty 
million francs would in March 1805 have 
been appropriated to the improvement of the 
roads in Picardy, or that an elaborate plan 
should have been projected, upon which there 
was much subsequent embroidery, for a con- 
centration of all the French squadrons at 
Martinique, in order that, having drawn the 
English off the scent, they might suddenly 
race back across the Atlantic to Boulogne. It 
was easy and natural to declare that the in- 
vasion had never been intended, when it was 
clear that the plan would not be carried 



132 NAPOLEON 

through. Then Napoleon represented in 
Olympian language that the Channel cross- 
ing was never more than the convenient 
pretext under which the army destined for a 
continental campaign could be mobilised, 
maintained and perfected without offence, 
that the millions expended on the flotilla, the 
roads, and the harbours were dust thrown 
into the eyes of the foreigner, and that the 
weapon which had been so studiously pointed 
at England was devised for the confusion of 
another country at the opposite end of Europe. 

In this apology there is just a sediment of 
truth, inasmuch as, the prospect of a war 
upon the Continent being always present to 
Napoleon's mind, the army of Boulogne was 
capable of being used in one of two ways, 
either, best of alL, against London, or, should 
the naval combination fail, against the league 
of mainland powers which Pitt was certain 
sooner or later to call into existence. Indeed, 
if England could not be invaded, there were 
only two means of effectually bringing her to 
reason — a stroke at India or a continental 
blockade. In 1798 Napoleon had tried the 
first course. After the breach of the Treaty of 
Amiens his mind was principally concerned 
with the second. To conquer England it 
might be necessary to conquer Europe; and 
should the invasion of this island hang fire, 
it was well to educate some continental 
quarrel to the point at which a rupture might 
be easily provoked. 

In this art of provocation Napoleon had 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 133 

nothing to learn from history. The court 
of Vienna, overwhelmed by a succession of 
military disasters, was prepared to swallow 
many humiliations before it would be drawn 
into a new fight. Without the faintest 
murmur it saw Hanover invaded, Naples re- 
occupied, Spain coerced to a money subsidy. 
It accepted in a mood of passive indignation 
the seizure of a French prince on Imperial 
territory and his summary execution after a 
secret trial. When Napoleon assumed the 
Imperial title it acquiesced; when by a refine- 
ment of domination he travelled to Aix-la- 
Chapelle, the old capital of Charlemagne, in 
order there to receive the letters from Austria 
acknowledging his dignity, it acquiesced also. 
Their highest military experts told the 
Austrians that they were not ready, and the 
prudent opinion of the Archduke Charles for 
many months overbalanced the rasher coun- 
sels of the firebrands. 

From this attitude of passive acquiescence 
Austria was rudely disturbed by the proceed- 
ings of Napoleon in Italy. Here the House 
of Hapsburg had already been compelled to 
accept a series of most unpalatable changes. 
It had seen a republic in Lombardy founded 
at its expense in 1797, restored at its expense 
in 1800, and two years later reconstituted in 
a stronger and more menacing form under the 
presidency of Napoleon. These operations it 
had been obliged to condone in the unreal 
hope that the " Italian Republic " might act as 
some kind of buffer between the French in 



134 NAPOLEON 

Piedmont and the Austrians in Venice. But 
in 1804 a new and alarming project was 
suddenly thrown out. Napoleon declared 
that it was incompatible with his new position 
as Emperor to retain the presidency of a 
republic. Austria was accordingly informed 
that the Italian Republic had been converted 
into an hereditary monarchy, that the throne 
had been accepted by Joseph Bonaparte, 
under adequate security that the crowns of 
Italy and France should never be united on a 
single head. Doubtful as this proposal was, 
it was soon replaced by a scheme infinitely 
more disconcerting to the Austrians. The 
announcement of Joseph's acceptance proved 
to be precipitate. On closer inspection that 
prudent and wealthy person, standing in the 
line of succession to the French Empire, did 
not care to exchange a comfortable expecta- 
tion at home for a laborious and responsible 
exile in Lombardy. For a time Napoleon 
entertained the idea of adopting the eldest 
son of his brother Louis, and of conferring 
upon a boy of three the titular sovereignty of 
Italy. But this scheme encountering opposi- 
tion from the father, the Emperor fell back 
upon a resolution which revealed more 
clearly the span of his ambition. He would 
wear the Italian crown himself. He would be 
King of Italy, his stepson Eugene Beauhar- 
nais acting as Viceroy in Milan. The arrange- 
ment would be temporary, a transitional 
kingship, pending the evacuation of Malta by 
the Briton and of Corfu by the Muscovite. 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 135 

But no political observer of competence be- 
lieved in these professions and safeguards, or 
thought that it was in the psychology of 
Napoleon to resign a crown. Indeed the 
Emperor threw no veil on his intentions. He 
was the new Charlemagne, lord of Aix-la- 
Chapelle and of Milan, controlling Gaul and 
Italy, freshly crowned and anointed Emperor 
of the French by the Pope of Rome. In June 
1805 he proceeded to Italy, crowned himself 
solemnly with the iron crown of the Lombard 
Kings in the Cathedral of Milan, even as in 
the Middle Ages the Holy Roman Emperors 
would come riding at the head of their Ger- 
man chivalry over the Brenner to affirm their 
visionary rights over the Lombard plain. 
Napoleon's powers were fuller and less con- 
tested than Barbarossa's; and during the 
course of his Italian visit he took occasion to 
create " an Imperial fief" for his sister Elise 
at Piombino, and to annex to the French Em- 
pire the convenient littoral of the Ligurian 
Republic. 

While Austria was thus directly challenged 
in Italy, she was urgently pressed to take up 
the glove by Russia and England. The Tsar 
Alexander, a young, generous, and ambitious 
prince, had, under the lively impress:* on of the 
D'Enghien execution, signed (Nov. 6, 1804) a 
defensive treaty with Austria to be enforced 
in the event of new encroachments on the part 
of France. Those encroachments had now 
been made : the Treaty of Luneville had been 
flagrantly ruptured, and it was represented 



136 NAPOLEON 

to the court of Vienna that if she did not 
act, and act promptly, she would get no men 
from Russia and no subsidies from England. 
On June 7, 1805, Francis joined the coalition 
and began to mobilise his army. The step 
did not escape the vigilance of Napoleon; but 
since some months would probably elapse 
before the Austrians were ready to take the 
field, he continued to elaborate his last great 
plan against England. Should that plan 
miscarry, he would come down like an ava- 
lanche on the hasty levies of the Emperor. 

"My fleet," he wrote from Boulogne to 
Talleyrand on August 23, "left Ferrol with 
thirty-four ships : it had no enemies in sight. 
If it obeys its orders and joins that of Brest 
and enters the Channel, there is still time; 
I am master of England." If not, "I strike 
my camp here, and on the 23rd of September 
I shall be in Germany with 200,000 men, and 
in the kingdom of Naples with 25,000 men. 
I shall march to Vienna and not hold my hand 
till I am master of Naples and Venice, and 
have so increased the dominions of the 
Elector of Bavaria as to leave me nothing 
further to fear from Austria." Now on 
August 15, Admiral Villeneuve, commanding 
the allied French and Spanish fleets, had 
given up the game and put back to Cadiz. 

The first object having been thus frustrated 
by the vigilance of the English navy, it 
remained for Napoleon to execute the grand 
alternative. With some lack of calculation 
the Austrians had determined to throw the 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 137 

bulk of their army into Italy, and to operate 
in Southern Germany with 50,000 men alone; 
but this error was far exceeded by the im- 
patience which refused to await the arrival 
of Russian supports. Though it had been 
arranged that 50,000 Russians should reach 
Braunau on the Inn on October 20, General 
Mack, the Austrian commander, thought it 
wise to press on towards the French frontier, 
partly that he might sway the Southern 
Germans to his side, and partly in the wilder 
hope that his arrival in France might be the 
signal for a domestic rebellion. The error 
met with prompt retribution. While Mack 
was dreaming of an uncontested progress 
through the Black Forest, an army three 
times the strength of his own, better led, 
better officered, and better disciplined, was 
racing across Germany over different routes 
and by stages marked with mathematical pre- 
cision. With a sure and rapid movement the 
net was drawn round the unsuspecting quarry; 
and three weeks after the Grand Army had 
crossed the Rhine, Mack and his Austrians 
capitulated at Ulm. "My plan," wrote the 
Emperor, "was carried out exactly as I con- 
ceived it"; and perhaps there is no instance, 
even in the military career of Moltke, when 
the execution of a great enveloping operation 
has so closely corresponded to its original 
design. 

While the Russians and Austrians were re- 
treating before Napoleon's advance a storm- 
cloud was slowly brewing up in the north of 



138 NAPOLEON 

Germany. The Prussian Government was 
then a very different affair from the formid- 
able instrument which now directs the ener- 
gies of fifty million disciplined and patriotic 
Germans. Falling short in wealth and popu- 
lation even of the humble standard of modern 
Ireland, Prussia seemed under the feeble and 
unimaginative rule of Frederick William III 
to have discarded the ambitions of a first-class 
power. For the last ten years she had pur- 
sued a steady system of neutrality, without 
courage or clairvoyance, and in spite of prov- 
ocations calculated to sting a spirited people 
into action. But there were limits even to 
Prussian patience, and in the autumn of 1805 
these limits were reached. With a cool as- 
surance of impunity a section of the French 
army had marched through Prussian ground 
on its way to Ulm. If such crimes were left 
unpunished what was the value of that neu- 
tral zone of which Prussia, in virtue of the 
Treaty of Basle, was the official protector? 
King and Tsar concerted a treaty of alliance 
at Potsdam. Prussia should offer her armed 
mediation to Napoleon. Her terms were 
meant to lead to war after the month's delay 
adjudged to be necessary for the oiling of the 
military machine, for she proposed to require 
of the victor of Ulm that he should withdraw 
from Holland, Germany, Naples, Switzer- 
land and Piedmont on pain of finding 180,000 
Prussians flung against his long line of com- 
munications. 

Common prudence should have suggested 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 139 

to the Emperors of Austria and Russia that 
it would be well to defer a general engagement 
until such time as the Prussian army had 
taken the field. Everything, in fact, was 
to be gained by delay, everything might be 
lost by a precipitate battle. The French 
Emperor, though master of Vienna, was 
exposed to a converging attack from the 
Archduke Charles, who was hurrying up from 
Italy, from the Russian army which had fallen 
back into Bohemia, and was attracting to 
itself such Austrian detachments as had 
succeeded in extricating themselves from the 
death-trap of Ulm. If to these formidable 
though scattered units there was added the 
weight of a Prussian army, operating on the 
middle Danube, the position of Napoleon in 
Moravia would become untenable. Indeed 
the Emperor of the French was so fully alive 
to the perils of the situation that he made 
overtures successively to Francis and Alex- 
ander in the hopes of breaking their accord. 
He was relieved from his embarrassments 
not by diplomacy, but by the obliging 
vanity of the Tsar. Believing that he could 
beat Napoleon, and anxious to make the glory 
all his own, Alexander was determined to 
force on a general engagement. It was on 
December 2, 1805, the anniversary of Napo- 
leon's coronation, that the great battle was 
fought which takes its name from the Mora- 
vian village of Austerlitz where the allied 
Emperors had established their headquarters. 
An amazing spirit of light-hearted confidence 



140 NAPOLEON 

reigned in the bivouacs of the French, and 
on the eve of the battle the frosty night was 
illumined by a torchlight dance of 70,000 
men acclaiming the Emperor and promising 
him victory on the morn. The allied army, 
some 80,000 strong, was posted on the heights 
of Pratzen, ground which Napoleon had 
already explored, and as the sun rose the 
enemy could be seen moving down from the 
plateau "like a torrent rushing to the plain.' ' 
Napoleon's plan was to draw the weight of 
the Russian attack against his right wing, 
which was so disposed as to invite it, and then 
to launch a superior force against the heights 
of Pratzen and break the Russian centre. 
The operations were timed with the nicety 
requisite to military success. "How long will 
it take you to reach the heights of Pratzen?" 
asked the Emperor of Soult. "Less than 
twenty minutes," was the Marshal's reply. 
"In that case," said the Emperor, "we can 
wait another quarter of an hour." When the 
rattle of musketry and boom of the guns 
showed that his right was engaged, Napoleon 
launched Murat, Bernadotte and Soult 
against the allied centre. The enemy fought 
with that Russian courage which has more 
than once claimed the admiration of history, 
but was overborne by the weight and dash of 
the antagonist. By noon Soult was master 
of the heights, and as the broken remnants 
of KutusofFs army were streaming down 
the northern slopes of the plateau the French 
centre wheeled round to the right and threw 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 141 

itself upon the flank and rear of the Russian 
left. The Emperor viewed from the chapel 
of St. Anthony the envelopment and de- 
struction of three Russian columns, and when 
the last shots had been exchanged, and in the 
gathering dusk of a winter evening, rode over 
the field, noting with a strange curiosity the 
silent or agonised trophies of the day. 

At this terrible stroke the war suddenly 
stopped. The crestfallen Tsar removed him- 
self to the north and Haugwitz, the Prussian 
envoy, who had been kept dangling in Vienna 
while the fate of Europe was hanging in the 
balance, was sternly compelled at Presburg 
to put his name to an ignominious peace. 
The heaviest retribution fell upon Austria, 
which now for the third time experienced 
the wrath of Napoleon. By the Treaty of 
Schonbrunn, December 26, 1805, Francis 
signed away the fair provinces of Venice, 
Istria and Dalmatia, the mountain bastion 
of the Tyrol, and those scattered lands in 
South-western Germany which were among 
the oldest possessions of the Hapsburg house. 

Austerlitz made Napoleon supreme in Italy 
and Southern Germany. In the first of these 
countries he had hitherto been confronted 
by three alien territories, Venice, Rome, 
Naples, each inconsiderable in itself, but de- 
riving from the moral and military support 
of Austria a title to be treated with a certain 
measure of caution. Having deleted one 
Austrian army at Ulm and broken part of 
another at Austerlitz, Napoleon was able to 



142 NAPOLEON 

pounce upon the possessions and allies of the 
Hapsfourg house in Italy. He incorporated 
Venice in his Italian kingdom, sent Massena 
to hunt the Bourbons out of Naples, and 
abruptly required the Pope to join the con- 
tinental blockade. To the demurs of the 
Curia he answered that he was Emperor of 
Rome and temporal head of the Church. 
Italy was his, and that it might be more 
securely held, the command of the Tyrolese 
passes was given to the faithful Bavarian ally, 
who received a crown and a son-in-law as a 
reward for his assistance in the campaign. 
The new janitor of Italy would be loyal to his 
trust, for his daughter, the bride of Eugene, 
was sent to hold court in Milan. 

By these drastic measures the malign and 
blighting influence of Austria was for eight 
years excluded from Italy. In that critical 
and most formative period of her growth 
Italy received both weal and woe from the 
hand of her powerful conqueror. Her sons 
were swept off to fight alien wars; her picture 
galleries were rifled; her treasuries were 
drained by the fiscal agents of a military 
tyranny, but at least she won from the govern- 
ment of Napoleon what the Austrians never 
could give her, a measure of national hope, a 
fresh outlook into the modern world and the 
elements of a strenuous education in public 
affairs. 

It was one of the peculiar advantages inci- 
dental to Napoleon's position that, being the 
autocrat of France, he could at any moment, 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 143 

and without the least delay, diplomatise to 
further his military ends. He had not entered 
the late campaign without first carefully ex- 
ploring the political ground in Germany. He 
saw that the South German powers were 
deeply apprehensive of Austrian ambition, 
and that by ministering to their selfish greed 
he could coerce them into an alliance with 
France. Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria 
were swept along in the French current, 
signed treaties with Napoleon and shared in 
the Austerlitz campaign. After the victory 
they claimed and received the lands and dig- 
nities with which such services are rewarded. 
The bargain was not one-sided. With in- 
credible rapidity Napoleon, the king-maker, 
extorted three children from the obliged 
potentates — one for a stepson, a second for 
the first cousin of a step-daughter, and a third 
for his brother Jerome; and by these amazing 
though not unhappy marriages gave to his 
own gigantic adventure a certain seal of 
respectability, and to three ancient but not 
too glorious lines an alien touch of romance. 1 
These alliances concluded and confirmed, 
the way was prepared for a last shattering 
blow at Austrian prestige in Germany. In 
June 1806 Napoleon abolished the Holy Ro- 
man Empire, and for that ancient, ineffective 
and very German institution substituted a 
highly effective but most unpatriotic league 
of princes, dependent on himself and pledged 
to give definite military support to the French 

1 Appendix II. 



144 NAPOLEON 

Empire. The Confederation of the Rhine, as 
this league is called, is an astonishing testi- 
mony to the helplessness into which a civilised 
people may allow itself to drift through cen- 
turies of unclear thinking and misplaced 
sentiment in politics. Napoleon, who could 
neither talk nor read a word of German, had 
sounded the depth of German weakness. He 
wanted German men and German money. 
Of the Teutonic literature, if we except 
Werther, which was devoured in a French 
translation, he knew nothing, and in his con- 
temptuous catalogue of the useless dreamers 
and impostors of the world he placed with 
confidence the name of Kant. 

Meanwhile the old problem of meting out 
punishment to "the cowardly oligarchs of 
London," had lost none of its insistency. 
An invasion was out of the question. The 
idea had been abandoned in August and the 
Battle of Trafalgar effectually precluded its 
resumption. Napoleon fell back upon a 
scheme of which some foretaste had already 
been given not only in his own earlier policy, 
but also in that of the Directory. He deter- 
mined to close the ports of Europe to English 
and Colonial wares. The execution of this 
gigantic plan, though it implied a dominion 
so wide and weighty that the annals of Asiatic 
tyranny must be searched for a parallel, never 
gave him an instant's pause. He saw, with 
the geometrical and ruthless lucidity which 
is the characteristic of his mind, a whole con- 
tinent obedient to his nod. One brother 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 145 

was sent to govern Naples, another was made 
King of Holland; the servility of Spain 
seemed to be as safe as the compliance of 
Leghorn, Genoa or Antwerp. But there were 
three serious gaps in the French customs line, 
Germany, Russia and Portugal, which could 
not be left unfilled without fatally wrecking 
the plan. Of these the widest and most im- 
portant was the northern littoral of Germany, 
which could only be brought into the system 
by the acquiescence or coercion of Prussia. 

The weak government of this rough and 
valiant people had been compelled by the 
Treaty of Presburg to accept from Napoleon 
the electorate of Hanover, a possession of 
the English Crown, long coveted by the 
statesmen of Berlin, but only to be acquired 
at the cost of a breach with England. The 
Prussians attempted in vain to reject a gift 
which they could not pocket without condign 
punishment from the British fleet, but since 
the one object of his astute generosity was to 
embroil them with the Court of St. James, 
Napoleon sternly refused to vary his terms. 
War broke out and the expected happened. 
England blockaded the ports and seized the 
merchant ships of the reluctant brigand. In 
Berlin, where anti-Gallican spirit was now 
running high, it was thought intolerable that 
Prussia should be involved in a war with her 
natural ally at the dictation of a tyrannical 
alien whose large and victorious army was 
still menacingly cantoned in Southern Ger- 
many. Napoleon took very little pains to 



146 NAPOLEON 

tranquillise Prussian apprehension, and when 
it leaked out that in the course of some abor- 
tive negotiations with the Government of 
Charles James Fox, the French Emperor had 
actually offered to restore Hanover to Eng- 
land, the cup was full and Frederick William 
mobilised his army. 

Napoleon was prepared. Though his corre- 
spondence in the summer of 1806 is mainly 
occupied with the affairs of Calabria, and 
gives the impression that he was more inter- 
ested in securing Joseph in his new kingdom 
in Naples than in the affairs of the North, he 
still kept a watchful eye upon the Prussians, 
knowing that war might come, and that, if it 
came, the army of Austerlitz would be ready 
to meet it. When the hour struck, he con- 
founded his enemy by a plan which ranks 
among the technical masterpieces of the mil- 
itary art. The Prussian army, which enjoyed 
a reputation far in excess of its real merits, 
was moving forward, under its aged com- 
mander the Duke of Brunswick, along the 
north of the Thuringian forest in the expecta- 
tion that it would strike the communications 
or parry the attack of an army advancing from 
the Rhine. Had Napoleon pursued this route 
he would still probably have won a victory, 
for in numbers and calibre he was superior to 
his adversary; but it would have been a vic- 
tory of an ordinary and inconclusive kind. 
The Prussians would have been driven back 
upon their lines of communications, and 
would have kept alive a defensive war until 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 147 

such time as they were joined by their Rus- 
sian allies. But Napoleon wanted an extra- 
ordinary and crushing victory. It was not 
enough for him to beat the Prussians, he must 
cut them from their base and destroy their 
army. Concentrating on the Main and then 
swiftly advancing in a north-easterly direction 
through the pine-clad gorges of the forest, 
he pushed forwards towards the Saale with 
160,000 men, confident of success and over- 
flowing with contempt for a supine and stupid 
opponent. The weather was superb, the 
country-side rich in provender, and there was 
hardly a straggler in the army, which marched 
thirty miles a day. On the evening of Octo- 
ber 12, Davotit with the third corps was at 
Naumberg, placed between the Prussian king 
and his capital, and in possession of the Prus- 
sian magazines. The disconcerting news 
that his position was effectually turned drove 
Brunswick to recommend a northerly re- 
treat; but it was then too late to escape the 
storm-cloud scudding up from the south. On 
October 14, Napoleon fell, to his own sur- 
prise but with overpowering numbers, upon 
Hohenlohe's covering force at Jena. His 
victory was decisive; but the greater honour 
belongs to Davotit, who, encountering the 
main force of the Prussians at Auerstadt, 
showed that a small contingent of the army of 
Austerlitz, undirected by the genius of Napo- 
leon and pitted against an adversary superior 
to itself in infantry, cavalry and guns, could 
nevertheless win a crushing victory. 



148 NAPOLEON 

This double blow administered on the same 
day, and followed up by a close and annihi- 
lating pursuit, placed Prussia under the heel 
of Napoleon. Two days before the battle he 
had written a letter to Frederick William III, 
couched in that peculiar strain of lofty elo- 
quence which he could affect on solemn oc- 
casions, in which the Prussian king was 
warned of an impending defeat and urged 
to make peace before it was too late. When 
the blood had once been shed the conqueror 
refused to hear of an armistice. He intended 
so to abase the Prussians that never again 
should they be able to contest his authority. 
He besieged and took all their fortresses, made 
his headquarters in their capital, and levied 
a crushing war-contribution upon a people 
already exhausted by extraordinary charges. 
And having thus in a most signal way 
"avenged the defeat of Rosbach," he issued 
(November 21) from Berlin the famous series 
of decrees which proclaimed the British Isles 
to be in a state of blockade, and prohibited all 
commerce and correspondence with them. 

Before these dazzling successes could be 
permanently secured it was necessary for 
Napoleon to fight another campaign. Though 
Bliicher had been forced to capitulate at 
Liibeck, and Hohenlohe had laid down his 
arms at Prenzlau, there was still a small frag- 
ment of the Prussian army at large, which, 
in combination with a Russian force advanc- 
ing to its relief through Poland, might be 
strong enough to repair the disaster on the 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 149 

Saale. Napoleon advanced to Warsaw and 
attempted to bring on a decisive engagement 
in December; but the enemy escaped from 
a net which was spread too wide, and the 
actions of Pultusk and Golymin showed that 
the swift and brilliant strategy of Ulm was 
not to be repeated amid the rigours of a Polish 
winter and against the baffling obstacle of 
Polish mud. The month of January was 
spent by the Emperor at Warsaw and en- 
livened by the charms of a Polish mistress, 
the fair Countess Walewska, who bore him 
a son, afterwards destined to be a foreign 
minister of France. But pleasure did not 
relax his vigilance, and hearing in February 
that Bennigsen was advancing to the relief 
of Danzig, he rushed northwards to attack 
him. The confused and savage struggle 
which took place amidst blinding snow at 
Prussisch-Eylau is just one of those engage- 
ments which lend force to Tolstoy's theory 
that a commander counts for nothing in a 
battle, and that victory is a result of forces 
too multitudinous to assess. For many a 
French soldier who survived it, that day of 
blood and snow came as the first sobering 
touch of tragedy in a glorious epic of adven- 
tures. Napoleon remained upon the field 
and claimed the victory; but he had lost 
25,000 men and was no further advanced 
towards a peace. 

Against the dark background of this incon- 
clusive campaign, with his army demoralised 
by privation and shaken in battle, with the 



150 NAPOLEON 

Swedes threatening his rear, and Austrian 
enmity impending on his flank, Napoleon 
shot out with incredible nimbleness flash after 
flash of Protean diplomacy. He concluded 
an armistice with the Swedes, protested 
pacific aspirations to the Austrians, and made 
abortive overtures to his two principal an- 
tagonists in the field. To create embarrass- 
ment for the Tsar he concluded a treaty with 
the Shah of Persia, and with a solemn proph- 
ecy that the hour for the regeneration of the 
Ottoman Empire was at hand, earnestly 
exhorted the Sultan of Turkey to fresh exer- 
tions against a common enemy. The national 
patriotism of the Poles was astutely encour- 
aged just up to the point at which it would 
assist the French without unduly alarming 
the susceptibilities of the Austrians. A grave 
military error on the part of Bennigsen re- 
lieved Napoleon from a situation to which 
every month of suspended operations would 
have added a fresh peril. There is a little 
tributary of the river Pregel which runs into 
the sea at Konigsberg called the Alle, and in 
one of the curves of the Alle is the village 
of Friedland. Here in a bad position with 
the stream behind him and with a force of 
four to seven, the Russian general allowed 
himself to be caught by Napoleon. The 
French victory was so complete that it drove 
the ruler of an invulnerable empire to believe 
that he was seriously wounded. 

The Peace of Tilsit, signed on July 8, 1807, 
is an arrangement reflecting an extraordinary 



THE CONQUESTS OF EMPIRE 151 

situation rather than a profound harmony 
of interests between the contracting powers. 
A Franco-Russian alliance is now a natural 
result of a compact and powerful Germany, 
and was until recently further cemented by 
the common rivalry of France and Russia 
with England. But when Napoleon met the 
Tsar upon a raft on the Niemen, Germany 
was a mosaic of weak and warring govern- 
ments, and immense tracts of space divided 
the most eastern outposts of the Muscovite 
from the British factories on the Hooghley. 
In the place of the Oriental antagonism of 
the later nineteenth century, the English and 
Russians in Napoleon's day were bound in a 
close conjunction of commerce. The foreign 
trade of Russia was mainly done with Eng- 
land, and there was no merchant in St. Peters- 
burg whose profits would not be gravely 
affected if the Anglo-Russian alliance were 
broken off. 

Apart from the erroneous conviction that 
nothing could be done after Friedland, Alex- 
ander was suffering from an acute state of 
irritation at the lukewarm support which he 
had received in the recent campaign from his 
English allies. He was therefore the more 
prone to accept an alliance recommended 
with all the seduction of Napoleon's manner, 
and sweetened with a prospect which might 
well outweigh the loss of some seaborne 
luxuries to the aristocracy of his capital. 
Among the historic passions of the Russian 
race none is stronger or more heartily recom- 



UZ NAPOLEON 

mended by the Greek Church than the re^ 
demption of the Byzantine Empire from the, 
Turk. Alexander was not immune from 
emotions which had assailed some of the 
greatest of his predecessors, and when Na- 
poleon suggested that the partition of Turkey 
was an object which the alliance might be 
able to effect, he swallowed his scruples and 
came to the lure. 

There was a public and a private treaty. 
By the first Alexander recognised the changes 
which Napoleon had already effected, or now 
proposed to effect, in the political map of 
Europe : Prussia mutilated of its western and 
eastern provinces; a new kingdom of West- 
phalia under Jerome Bonaparte on the one 
hand; a new grand-duchy of Warsaw under 
the King of Saxony on the other. The secret 
treaty was even more significant, for it pre- 
scribed the course to be pursued, should 
England decline to accept the mediation of 
Russia, or Turkey the mediation of France. 
In the first case Russia would join the con- 
tinental blockade and combine with France 
in forcing Denmark, Sweden, Portugal and 
Austria to make war on English commerce. 
In the second case Napoleon would assist 
the Tsar to partition the European posses- 
sions of Turkey, save Constantinople and 
Roumelia. The exception is a footnote to 
Napoleon's ambition, for when Alexander 
asked for the Turkish capital he was met by 
a stern refusal. "Constantinople! Never! 
That would be the mastery of the world." 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 153 

Napoleon was in the finest spirits. The 
agonies and anxieties of the Polish campaign 
had been succeeded by banquets, courtesies 
and a brilliant peace. He liked the Tsar: 
"He is a very handsome, good young Em- 
peror, with more mind than he is generally 
credited with"; and in the Russian alliance 
he felt that he had secured the sanction and 
support which were necessary to rivet his 
dominion in the West. The Queen of Prussia, 
too, had pleased him, the more so that he had 
resisted, while enjoying, her entreaties. It 
was satisfactory to know that Prussia was 
under his heel, mutilated in territory, ex- 
hausted in treasure and heavily burdened by 
a French army of occupation. He hoped, 
perhaps expected, that England, confounded 
by such triumphs, would accept the Russian 
terms, restore her colonial conquests and 
amend her maritime law. In that event he 
would be free to obey the call of the East: 
but if the islanders were still blinded by arro- 
gance, he was now so placed that he could 
"conquer the sea by the land." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 

By this time the Empire of Napoleon, 

though it had not yet reached its extreme 

measure, was far in advance of the opinions 

and ideals cherished by the French nation. 

'The Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, these," 



154 NAPOLEON 

said Talleyrand to the Tsar, "are the con- 
quests of the French nation. The rest is the 
conquest of Napoleon." And although the 
unbroken uniformity of his military triumphs 
silenced the critic and kept alive the devotion 
and enthusiasm of the army, the Emperor 
was uneasily aware of the fact that the 
nation was tired of war, that each successive 
victory evoked a diminishing response in 
public opinion, and that the Grand Empire 
rested on a basis of personal achievement 
rather than of national assent. When the 
news of Marengo came to Paris the delirium 
of joyful excitement surpassed belief. Six 
years later the intelligence of Jena hardly 
stirred a ripple in the pool. Mme. Junot, 
who moved among soldiers, tells us that 
though the duel with England was popular, 
there was very little feeling for a war with 
Austria in 1805; and while the designs of 
the Emperor on the mainland were thus 
regarded with a growing sense of lassitude or 
dismay, the passion for distant enterprise 
over sea, which made the British Empire, 
was so conspicuously absent from the French 
temperament at that date, that the expedi- 
tion to San Domingo was widely regarded as 
a measure devised quite as much for the 
chastening of the French republicans as for 
the due admonishment of a rebel colony. 

In this essential opposition between the 
national interest of France and the prompt- 
ings of his own ambition we find the explana- 
tion of many characteristic features of Na- 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 155 

poleon's Imperial policy. The Emperor was 
astute enough to see that if the principal 
burden of maintaining his dominion were cast 
upon France the stability of his throne would 
be seriously undermined. The cardinal 
axiom of his Empire was accordingly to spare 
as far as possible the pockets of his French 
subjects, and to charge the cost of his ambi- 
tion to the account of his foreign victims. It 
is true that some additions were made to the 
financial burdens of France, and that the in- 
convenience of war was indirectly brought 
home to the French taxpayer in the enhanced 
prices of wine, salt and tobacco. So long, 
however, as a nation continues to escape any 
fresh imposition of direct taxation or any 
serious depreciation of currency, the sharp 
lesson is never fully learnt by the non-com- 
batant section of the community. Napoleon 
neither raised an income tax nor tolerated 
paper money, and the manufacturers and 
merchants, who are generally the first to feel 
the strain of a war, were consoled by a system 
which threw open the markets of Holland, 
Germany and Italy to French trade without 
involving a relaxation of the domestic tariff 
against the new dependencies of the Empire. 
So far then as finance was concerned the pinch 
was felt not by the wealthiest and most civi- 
lised member of the Empire, but by its rela- 
tively poor dependencies. France was spared, 
while in the Italian, German and Dutch prov- 
inces of the Empire half the domains were 
permanently appropriated to Imperial uses 



156 NAPOLEON 

and the inhabitants triply mulcted by war 
contributions in specie, by French billetings, 
and by the obligation of finding and equip- 
ping local contingents to the Grand Army. 

The means by which Napoleon attempted 
to create and sustain an Imperial feeling in 
France are characteristic of that mixture of 
the vulgar and sublime which we find in his 
conversation and character. At the end of 
his first Italian campaign he rebuked Mar- 
mont for having neglected to feather his nest 
after the example of Massena and many 
another officer who had laid the foundations 
of a princely fortune in the plunder of Italy. 
He was well pleased that his generals should 
have a material interest in campaigning and 
a substantial stake in the countries which 
their valour had brought under his dominion; 
and with the establishment of the Empire 
he gave an extended application to this 
principle. A number of ducal and princely 
fiefs were created, mainly (though not exclu- 
sively) out of the Venetian, Istrian, and Dal- 
matian provinces wrested from Austria, so 
that at the most perilous angle of the Em- 
pire there might be a cluster of military 
families, pledged like the frontier feudatories ' 
of the fifth century, by urgent considerations 
of the pocket, to defend it. The enormous 
incomes showered on the marshals, and 
derived not from the French Exchequer but 
from the domains of the conquered depend- 
encies, were similarly granted with the object 
of popularising the Empire with the military 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 157 

caste. But the interests of the common 
soldier were less carefully regarded, and the 
victors of Jena and Friedland received part 
of their long arrears of pay in coin which had 
depreciated forty per cent. 

The creation of a new nobility with large 
fortunes and entailed estates was a departure, 
far more important than the Legion of Hon- 
our, from the revolutionary principle of social 
equality. Napoleon defended his consistency 
by pointing out that no political privilege 
was associated with rank; nor would any one 
accuse him of desiring to prepare an oligarchy. 
His motive was to range round the dynasty 
a circle of powerful and wealthy families, 
whose estates, held together under a special 
legal privilege, would stand out like conspic- 
uous islands in an ocean of peasant holdings. 

Another institution dating from this period, 
and founded in the same desire to promote 
Imperial conformity, is the University of 
France. The idea of a single corporation, 
comprising all branches of public instruction, 
from the village teacher to the University 
professor, and itself controlled and guided 
by a few cardinal and directing principles 
of political hygiene, is naturally seductive 
to that type of mind which holds that the 
purpose of the State cannot be too deeply 
graven on the nature of the citizen. Napo- 
leon, who disbelieved in humanity without 
the support of strong discipline, was greatly 
impressed with the work of the Catholic 
orders in promoting the principle of authority. 



158 NAPOLEON 

"There will," he wrote, February 15, 1805, 
"be no fixed political state if there is no 
teaching body with fixed principles. As long 
as children are not taught whether they 
ought to be republican or monarchical, 
Catholic or irreligious, the State will not form 
a nation." He was resolved that young 
France should be schooled in the military, 
religious and deferential temper, after the 
Spartan or Jesuit example. His lycee, or 
public school, was half monastery, half bar- 
rack, its teaching staff celibate, its discipline 
military, its creed that wonderful Imperial 
catechism in which the Emperor is portrayed 
as the instrument of God's power and His 
likeness upon earth; and the lycee was under 
the University Council, which in turn was 
controlled by the State. Private endowments 
exempt the older universities and schools 
of England from the irksome constraint of 
Government supervision, and they have 
preserved under a rule of liberty a polite 
and respectable convention. Napoleon's Uni- 
versity, which was founded in 1808, endured 
for three generations after the fall of the 
Empire, and has incurred the criticism which 
an attempted educational monopoly natur- 
ally invites. The complete intellectual har- 
mony of forty million Europeans is an end as 
hopeless of attainment as it is little to be 
desired, and since Napoleon did nothing for 
the primary schools the great mass of the 
people was unaffected by the loyal prescrip- 
tions of the University. 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 159 

Nevertheless there is a quality of perma- 
nence in all that part of Napoleon's work which 
affects the organisation of historic France. 
Here he built upon a groundwork of inherited 
instinct, followed the centralising trend of 
national history, and obeyed the ordered 
genius of the Latin race. The Grand Empire 
was a less substantial fabric. Even where, as 
in Italy, it fortified deep and valuable ele- 
ments of national feeling, it never lost the 
character of a great improvisation of war, in 
Napoleon's own terms of "a conquest made 
from England." Boundaries were constantly 
changing, as if the map of Europe were a ka- 
leidoscope shaken by a capricious hand in fits 
of malevolent enjoyment. Thus Holland was 
first a dependent republic, then a dependent 
monarchy, and finally, since King Louis 
would not adequately execute the laws of 
blockade, an incorporated and much tor- 
mented fragment of France. Such evidence 
of restlessness was well calculated to disturb 
the servants of the Emperor in foreign parts. 
The best administration is grounded on a 
lively hope that some part at least of the 
building will stand the stress of time. But 
how could such a hope take root in the 
shifting quicksands of Napoleon's diplomacy? 
The Constitution of Westphalia, which was 
far in advance of any native product, was in- 
tended to serve as a pattern to Germany, and 
was in fact a source of pride to the Hessians, 
B runs wickers and Prussians who formed the 
population of that heterogeneous State. But 



160 NAPOLEON 

what guarantee was forthcoming that the 
Westphalian Constitution would not share 
the fate of the Italian extinguished at the first 
breath of opposition; or that the Westpha- 
lians themselves would not awake some morn- 
ing to find that by an Imperial decree they 
had been converted into Frenchmen, their 
constitutional kingdom at an end and Cassel 
proclaimed the fourth or fifth city of Empire? 
Napoleon often spoke of his realm as a 
federation. Now in so far as this term has a 
technical meaning, it implies a division of 
sovereignty between the national government 
of the federal union and the governments of 
the states or provinces into which that union 
is divided. The national government is 
sovereign for certain defined purposes, the 
state or provincial governments are sovereign 
for other purposes. There is an allocation 
of duties, a distribution of rights; there are 
boundaries chartered and guaranteed against 
aggression on either side. The spirit of a 
federal government is that communities 
sharing many distinctive qualities, traditions 
and interests, but united also on a common 
interest, enter into a bond framed upon such 
nice principles of equitable compromise as to 
satisfy both the particularist feeling on the 
one hand and the larger aspiration on the 
other. Nor is there any feature more char- 
acteristic of a federation than its scrupulous 
allocation of fiscal burdens. Of all this there 
is nothing whatever in the Napoleonic Em- 
pire, neither a division of sovereignty, nor a 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 161 

circumscription of functions, nor a fair re- 
partition of the charges of peace and war. 
Finally there was no constitution. The 
Empire may be likened to three concentric 
circles — France including the annexed and in- 
corporated provinces, the dependencies in 
Gemany and Italy created by Napoleon (e. g. 
Westphalia, Berg, Italy), and those autono- 
mous states, like Bavaria and Wiirtemberg, 
which under the articles of the Confederation 
of the Rhine were bound to furnish contin- 
gents for the army. It is no more an argu- 
ment against Napoleon than it is against the 
present loose state of the British Empire, 
that the several parts of this vast dominion 
were not combined in any form of legislative 
union; for if no account is taken of the spirit, 
nothing can be argued from the letter. The 
British Empire is cemented by common 
interest and common sentiment; the cohe- 
sion of its French counterpart was at once of 
a looser and a stricter kind, for it depended 
on the will of a despot and the force of an 
army of cosmopolitan conscripts. 

The high Imperial opportunities, so far as 
they were extended to persons outside the 
civil service of France, were given to the 
natives of the annexed departments and con- 
tingents from Belgium and Holland, Pied- 
mont, Genoa, Tuscany and Rome were dis- 
patched to the capital of the Empire to 
serve on the Senate, the Legislature or the 
Council of State. It was fully present to 
Napoleon's mind that such opportunities 



162 NAPOLEON 

would educate an Imperial spirit and famil- 
iarise his new subjects with that large and 
constructive way of handling affairs which 
had now, through the pressure of his own 
character and intellect, become habitual with 
the able members of his Council. To a 
generation educated on a free Press and an 
active Parliament, a purely executive body 
is not the ideal seminary of public virtue. 
It is too apt to be composed of elderly men 
and to be wedded to routine. Napoleon 
devised a scheme for combating this inherent 
vice of official representation, and ordered the 
debates of the Council of State to be followed 
by a number of chosen youths, drawn from 
every part of the Empire, and possessed of 
intelligence, zeal and a competent fortune. 
In the auditeurs, as these young persons were 
called, the Emperor expected to find the 
Imperial executive of the future. 

The resemblance between the Napoleonic 
and the Roman Empire, though losing some- 
thing of its closeness upon examination, 
is still the most striking analogy in political 
history. The autocracy, the centralisation, 
the tribute, the auxiliaries, the two Imperial 
capitals crowded with the spoils of the 
civilised world — these are the obvious and 
familiar points of comparison. Cuncta collegia 
prceter antiquitus constituta distraxit, writes 
Suetonius of Julius Csesar, and the jealousy of 
free corporations which inspired the policy of 
Julius and his successors is deeply imprinted 
on the law of the French Revolution and 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 163 

on the Napoleonic code. It is true that the 
provinces of the early Roman Empire enjoyed 
a degree of local liberty unknown to any 
French department or dependency during the 
Napoleonic age. Nor was the scheme of 
government under Diocletian and his suc- 
cessors as strict, as economical nor as effective 
as that of Napoleon. On the other hand, the 
historian will note some points of analogy 
between the organisation of the frontier 
provinces of the second and that of the Cata- 
lonian and Illyrian and Polish marches of the 
nineteenth century. So, too, in the ecclesias- 
tical sphere, despite an enormous religious 
development of the religious life of the world, 
we find curious points of analogy. The 
worship of Rome and Augustus may be 
matched by the Imperial catechism made by 
the hand of Napoleon himself, and enjoining 
semi-divine honours to be paid to the office 
and person of the Emperor of the French. 
As the Roman Government presented a 
special sacrifice in the Temple of Jerusalem, 
presumably out of compliment to the religion 
of the Jews, so Napoleon professed the Koran 
in Egypt, established the Roman Catholic 
Church in France, and being confronted with 
an assembly of Dutch divines in Utrecht 
declared that he had been on the point of 
joining the Protestant Communion, and that 
in that case thirty or forty million men would 
have followed his example. The religious 
policy of both Empires was in the first in- 
stance characterised by a large toleration for 



164 NAPOLEON 

all creeds not inconsistent with social order 
or due political obedience to the Government. 
But the ecclesiastical outlook of Napoleon 
was more positive than that of the pagan, 
more comprehensive than that of the Chris- 
tian Csesars. The religious impulses of Eu- 
rope had become too important to be treated 
with disdain or neglect, and too obstinately 
various in their manifestations to admit of a 
persecuting and exclusive preference. The 
French Empire, therefore, pursued the system 
of impartial regulation and establishment. It 
disciplined and controlled the Jew, the 
Protestant and the Catholic, regarding the 
members of these communions as equal citi- 
zens of the Empire, equally and fully subject 
to all its burdens. Napoleon was not a 
religious missionary like Julian or Charle- 
magne, but an indifferent like Pontius Pilate. 
Religion was to him a useful vaccine against 
social distempers. If he had a mission it 
was to smooth over doctrinal differences, to 
minimise or eliminate ecclesiastical contro- 
versy, and to emphasise the distinction be- 
tween secular and ecclesiastical functions. 
The dissidence of Dissent struck him when 
he first came across it in Holland with an 
unpleasant thrill, as highly inconvenient to 
the police. "If you are against the Pope," 
he said to the Jansenists, "range yourself with 
the Protestants. But if you admit the power 
of the Pope, then respect his decisions." It 
was not for a club of obscure Dutch pedants 
to abridge the authority of the vicar of 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 165 

Christ. That necessary and salutary func- 
tion belonged alone to the Emperor of the 
French, who represented the supreme source 
of civil power in Latin Christianity. 

The image and name of Charlemagne, 
which so frequently occurs in the Imperial 
correspondence, was powerfully recalled to 
the common mind of France by the trium- 
phant conclusion of the Marengo campaign. 
English visitors to Paris, during the Peace of 
Amiens, reported that it was the general 
expectation that the First Consul would 
shortly assume the title of Emperor of the 
Gauls; and if this was the common talk and 
feeling of Paris, we may guess with what 
power the example of the great Frankish hero 
appealed to such a mind as Napoleon's. The 
French Empire betrays many signs of this 
feeling. The sovereign who rules France and 
Belgium, Germany and the Spanish march, 
who inaugurates his Empire by a pact with 
the Pope of Rome, who takes the iron crown 
of Lombardy, carves out military fiefs for his 
vassals, summons an ecclesiastical council, 
poses as the civil head of the Catholic Church 
of the West, and leads a miscellaneous host 
drawn from every quarter of his vast Empire, 
in an assault on the half -barbarous and wholly 
heretical Empire of the Tsar, is he not a new 
Charlemagne? Modern historians have sug- 
gested other medieval analogies. Taine has 
found in him the Italian eondottiere, and 
Masson, an almost unreserved admirer, re- 
minds us that the hammer of the Pope, the 



166 NAPOLEON 

Jesuits and the monks, was the descendant 
of certain medieval Bonapartes who, like 
Dante, were expelled from Florence for their 
Ghibelline opinions. 

In one respect at least the Empire of 
Napoleon was neither Roman nor medieval, 
but intensely modern. Napoleon was the 
genius of economy. Not Wellington, not Pitt, 
not Gladstone, all of them jealous husbands 
both of time and money, approached Napo- 
leon in this particular of harsh, persistent and 
relentless economising. Frugal in dress, 
sparing in food and drink, parsimonious of 
time, and contemptuous of amusement, he 
turned his jealous and challenging eye on 
every franc expended in the public service. 
There was, we imagine, in the whole course 
of history, no great State managed with 
so scrupulous an intention of paring down 
all unnecessary expenses, no great State in 
which the officials were so ceaselessly tor- 
mented about every sixpence or sou, or where 
it was so impossible for any municipal body 
to make a free experimental and productive 
use of its resources. Almost immediately 
after the coup d'etat of Brumaire Napoleon 
put down upon paper, for the benefit of his 
brother Lucien, then Minister of the Interior, 
some thoughts upon the administration of the 
communes of France. And in this memo- 
randum, one of the most remarkable State 
papers of the time, he at once strikes the 
note which continues to dominate his domes- 
tic policy. The 36,000 communes of France 



THE QUALITIES OF EMPIRE 167 

are described as the heiresses of the feudal 
regime, heiresses liberated by the Revolution 
from the control of noble and priest, and 
thereupon endowed with legal personality, 
but so despoiled and pillaged by the bandits 
of the Directory that they are encumbered 
with debt, and unable to make an intelligent 
use of their new freedom and their new re- 
sources. The problem of internal government 
in France was therefore to conduct these 
helpless and diseased bodies back to a whole- 
some state of solvency. How this is to be 
done is then shown in all its successive stages. 
A general inventory of the 36,000 communes 
is to be made under nine specified headings, 
so that when the indebted communes and the 
amount of their burden have been duly 
ascertained, the whole weight of the adminis- 
tration may be focused on their relief. The 
prefect is to visit them twice, the sub-prefect 
four times a year, on pain -of dismissal. The 
mayor who will not co-operate must go; 
the mayor who achieves distinction in his 
economies is to be rewarded by a visit to 
Paris, an introduction to the Consuls, and a 
monumental column in the village or town 
whose solvency he has helped to secure. 
Napoleon achieved his ends; a system of 
strict mathematical economy, uniformly im- 
pressed upon every village and town in France 
by the Ministry of the Interior, succeeded in 
effecting a great reduction of municipal debt; 
but when we talk of these financial triumphs, 
or of the military exploits of the Empire 



168 NAPOLEON 

which they were designed to subserve, we 
must remember that the medal has another 
side, and that if we could revisit any great 
provincial town of France as it stood in 
any year from 1808 to 1815, we should find 
the schoolmasters and clergy starving upon 
miserable pittances, the schools empty of 
scholars, the public hospitals short of nurses 
and appliances, industry at a standstill, and 
the government of the town listless, incurious 
and sapped of all initiative. It is not sensible 
or imaginative finance to lay down for the 
rule of the Medes and Persians that the cost 
of office expenses in a town is to be fifteen 
centimes per inhabitant. We cannot go into 
the reasons here, save that finance, like all 
human things, loses much by being treated 
mechanically, but such a rule is characteristic 
of the labour-saving appliances necessary in 
a great and highly centralised Empire. Being 
compelled to treat men as figures such a 
government ends by viewing life itself as a 
matter of abstract arithmetic. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE FIRST CHECK 

The effort to complete the continental 
blockade brought Napoleon into collision 
with the two strongest forces in European 
civilisation, the Catholic Church and the 
spirit of nationality. He had long regarded 
the existence of a Papal State, which Catho- 



THE FIRST CHECK 169 

lies thought necessary to ensure the spiritual 
independence of the Pope, as a harmful 
anomaly in European affairs. The evil, how- 
ever, had been tolerated in the political set- 
tlement of 1797, and the Pope, who assented 
to the Concordat and came to Paris for the 
Imperial coronation, was still the temporal 
ruler of a dominion stretching across Italy 
from Terracina to Rimini. At whatever cost 
of diplomatic friction a cool and prudent 
statesman would have allowed this situation 
to continue, for the strength of the Pope did 
not lie in the feeble government of his small 
and impoverished Italian principality, but 
in his power of arousing the Catholic con- 
science of Europe. Napoleon after Austerlitz 
was neither cool nor prudent; having assumed 
the mantle of Charlemagne he argued that 
he was Lord of Rome and that the Pope was 
a vassal of his Empire. A power so weak in 
material resources, but so ingenious in chi- 
cane, might be safely and properly coerced, 
and in the refusal of Pius VII to join in an 
offensive war against England a sufficient 
pretext was found for devouring his State. 
The formal incorporation of Rome in the 
French Empire, which was deferred until 
May 1809, was at once answered by a bull of 
excommunication against the despoiler of the 
Church. To this the reply was an act of 
violence, encouraged, disavowed and upheld 
by Napoleon. At the dead of night the deli- 
cate old man who had dared to defy the 
French Emperor was seized in the Quirinal 



170 NAPOLEON 

Palace and hastily driven away under mili- 
tary convoy to a prison in Savona. 

Napoleon's idea of the Catholic Church was 
abruptly opposed to the conceptions and 
practices which found general favour after 
his fall. He thought of it as a department 
of the French Empire, to be most safely and 
conveniently governed from Paris, and of 
the Papacy as nothing beyond the foremost 
of the Imperial bishoprics. Regarding it as 
absurd that the College of Cardinals should 
be mainly recruited from Italy, he proposed 
that every Catholic country should have red 
hats proportionate to its population. It was 
for the Emperor to summon the Councils of 
the Church, to salary the Pope and to support 
the spiritual energies of Catholicism with the 
might of his temporal arm. The archives of 
the Holy See were transported to Paris, and 
some hints were thrown out of a German 
Patriarchate independent of Rome. Indeed, 
had the Empire endured for ten more years 
it is possible that the Catholic communities 
of the American continent would have been 
obliged to sever their connection with a 
Church so degraded and transformed. 

While the quarrel with the Papacy was 
in full blast, and every Roman priest was 
raining anathemas on his head, Napoleon em- 
barked upon the conquest of the most Catho- 
lic nation in Europe. To complete the con- 
tinental blockade it was necessary that the 
Iberian Peninsula, and more particularly the 
kingdom of Portugal, should be effectively 



THE FIRST CHECK 171 

brought within the French system, and no 
sooner had a peace been concluded with 
Russia than Napoleon began to take steps for 
the coercion of the court of Lisbon. With this 
plan was ingeniously combined a project of 
vaster dimension and difficulty. The king- 
dom of Spain, under a weak, corrupt and un- 
popular Government, had gone every length 
in its subservience to Napoleon. It had 
furnished him subsidies and ships, had de- 
clared war upon England at his bidding, and 
had been compelled to witness the destruc- 
tion of its fleet in a quarrel in which no vital 
interest of its own was involved. But during 
the Prussian campaign, when it was believed 
in Madrid that Napoleon was about to meet 
a serious check, Godoy, the favourite of the 
Queen and the real governor of the kingdom, 
resolved upon a sudden stroke for liberty. A 
proclamation was issued for the mobilisation 
of the Spanish army; then upon the news of 
Jena promptly withdrawn. It was sufficient 
to remind Napoleon of the fact that he could 
have no stable peace with the Spanish King, 
and to urge him forward in a policy which 
had floated before his mind in 1805, of deal- 
ing a final blow at that effete Bourbon stock 
from which France, Parma and Naples had 
been so happily relieved. 

In contriving the downfall of the Spanish 
monarchy Napoleon showed himself a true 
countryman of Macchiavelli. There was 
never a plot more coldly and cleverly calcu- 
lated to mystify, perplex, disarm and over- 



172 NAPOLEON 

awe the opponents of a violent revolution. 
The first step was to demand of a penitent 
and frightened Government a contingent of 
15,000 good troops to serve upon the Danish 
frontier. When this exaction had been com- 
plied with, and the Spanish veterans had 
been safely shipped off to the inclement plain 
of Holstein, a secret convention was arranged 
at Fontainebleau on October 27, 1807, for the 
invasion and partition of Portugal. The true 
significance of this singular document lay in 
the fact that it gave to Napoleon an excuse 
for drafting French troops into Spain. The 
Regent of Portugal had consented under pres- 
sure to close his ports to English commerce, 
and had the blockade been the one object in 
Napoleon's mind this concession should have 
been sufficient to protect Portugal from at- 
tack. But Napoleon wanted a quarrel, and 
in the refusal of the Regent to sequestrate 
British merchandise he found a pretext suf- 
ficient to his purpose. Portugal then was to 
be invaded by a joint French and Spanish 
force, and when the kingdom had been duly 
conquered Godoy was to be rewarded by a 
principality in the south. The royal favour- 
ite, who had been thoroughly cowed by the 
exposure of his ill-timed and hostile procla- 
mation, was only too eager to make his peace 
with Napoleon. Had his intelligence been 
equal to his cupidity he would have reflected 
that it was not the Emperor's way to requite 
evil with good, and that the false friend was 
not likely to be endowed with a Portuguese 



THE FIRST CHECK 173 

principality. Napoleon had accurately as- 
sessed the quality of the Spaniard. "This 
mayor of the palace," he said, "is loathed by 
the nation: he is the rascal who will himself 
open for me the gates of Spain." 

On October 18, 1807, Junot's army of the 
Gironde 25,000 strong crossed the Bidassoa 
on its way to Lisbon. Its operations were 
to be assisted by an equivalent number of 
Spaniards advancing on three routes, an ar- 
rangement calculated still further to denude 
Spain of troops at a moment when it was con- 
venient for Napoleon that the country should 
be inadequately defended. The plan was 
that while Junot seized the fleet, royal family 
and treasure at Lisbon, French troops should 
be drafted into Spain upon the friendly 
pretext of supporting the joint expedition. 
It would then be possible to terrify the weak 
Charles IV into resignation or flight, to put 
down the unpopular Godoy and to take over 
the kingdom, if not amid the acclamations at 
least with the acquiescence of the natives. 

When Junot after a march accompanied 
by great hardship finally reached Lisbon on 
November 30, he found that the royal family 
had embarked upon the British fleet and that 
the treasure and marine of Portugal was 
beyond his reach. Still in broad outline 
Napoleon's scheme of treachery appeared to 
prosper. Portugal was conquered. Under 
the cloak of the Portuguese expedition five 
French armies crossed into Spain, nominally 
to support their friends the Spaniards, but 



174 NAPOLEON 

really in order to pave the way to a French 
occupation. If there remained in any Spanish 
mind a doubt as to the real intention of the 
Emperor it must have been solved in Febru- 
ary and March 1808, when the French troops 
seized the four important Spanish strong- 
holds, Pampeluna, Barcelona, San Sebastian 
and Figueras, and it was learnt that Murat, 
the best cavalry leader of the Emperor, was 
rapidly advancing on Madrid in the char- 
acter of the Emperor's lieutenant. 

Then arose the situation up to which Na- 
poleon had been working. In a wild panic 
at the French advance, Charles IV, Maria 
Louisa and Godoy resolved on flight. They 
would go to Seville, thence perhaps to Amer- 
ica, to avoid the rigours of the Emperor and 
the still more dangerous wrath of a nation 
whose long-stored hatred of their rule was 
now envenomed by a sudden sense of its be- 
trayal. But at Aranjuez the fugitives were 
stopped by an insurrection which threatened 
to spoil Napoleon's design; for the old king 
was forced to abdicate in favour of his son 
Ferdinand, the Prince of the Asturias. 

The new ruler of Spain was the darling of 
the nation not by reason of any virtues which 
he possessed, for he was empty of charm, 
intelligence and character, but because in the 
imagination of his country he stood out as 
the enemy of a shameful court. It would 
have been simple for Ferdinand, having this 
immense popularity with his countrymen, to 
have rallied the whole Spanish nation against 



THE FIRST CHECK 175 

the invaders. Fortunately for Napoleon the 
man was a coward. Instead of declaring war 
he ingeminated peace. Instead of retiring 
to Andalusia to rally the Spanish army, he 
came to Madrid, where a French corps under 
Murat had arrived, and wrote a grovelling 
letter to Napoleon. General Murat, who knew 
a craven when he saw one, refused to acknowl- 
edge his title. Ferdinand trembled, felt his 
throne insecure, and allowed himself to be 
lured to Bayonne on the pretext that some per- 
sonal conference was necessary before he could 
be accepted by the Emperor as King of Spain. 
On the day of his arrival he learnt that Na- 
poleon had come to the conclusion that the 
House of Bourbon should cease to reign. 

"Countries full of monks like yours," said 
Napoleon, "are easy to subdue. There may 
be some riots, but the Spaniards will quiet 
down when they see that I offer them the 
integrity of the boundaries of their kingdom, 
a liberal constitution and the preservation of 
their religion and their national customs." 

Ferdinand proving recalcitrant it was 
found necessary to confront him with his 
father and mother. Napoleon had extracted 
from Charles IV a statement that his abdica- 
tion had been made under duresse; and since 
the old man desired nothing better than to be 
quit of care and turmoil, the plan was that 
he should compel his son to resign and then 
himself sign a deed of abdication. A true 
piece of Spanish comedy was enacted before 
Napoleon on May 2, in which the characters 



176 NAPOLEON 

were a sullen young prince, an angry, rheu- 
matic old father, and a licentious mother with 
the tongue and temper of a fishwife. The 
king commanded his son to resign and was 
met with a steady refusal; but there was an 
arrow left in Napoleon's quiver far more 
pointed than a father's behest. Having 
received intelligence of a serious revolt 
against the French in Madrid, Napoleon 
charged the young man with complicity, and 
informed him that if he did not resign that 
evening he would be treated as a traitor and 
a rebel. On this Ferdinand, who had no de- 
sire to share the fate of the Due d'Enghien, 
wrote out an abdication, and since his father 
had ratified a treaty on the previous day, 
resigning all his rights to the throne of Spain 
to the Emperor Napoleon, the tragi-comedy 
of Bayonne was brought to a successful con- 
clusion. The vacant monarchy, after having 
been refused by Louis, was accepted by 
Joseph Bonaparte, while Murat, being given 
the choice of Portugal or Naples, wisely 
determined to rule in Italy. 

Napoleon afterwards acknowledged that it 
was the Spanish ulcer that destroyed him. 
He had embarked upon the subjugation of a 
country the like of which he had not yet met 
in his varied career. Italy, Austria and Ger- 
many were geographical expressions, bundles 
of states swayed by no common passion and 
obeying the control of governments which 
found neither source nor sanction in the pop- 
ular will. Spain, on the other hand, was a 



THE FIRST CHECK 177 

nation, standing aloof from other countries 
in a certain proud detachment and insensible 
to the movements which enliven and trans- 
form opinion. The breath of the French 
Revolution had not crossed the Pyrenees. 
Constitutional liberties, rights of man, relig- 
ious toleration, the catchwords and conquests 
of French civilisation, had no seduction for 
the Spaniard. He only saw in Napoleon the 
enemy of his religion, the kidnapper of his 
king and the invader of his country. A spon- 
taneous, sporadic movement, which was a 
lesson to all Europe, seized hold of the land 
and when, on June 23, Dupont's corps sur- 
rendered to a Spanish army at Baylen, Napo- 
leon realised that he had miscalculated the 
difficulties of his task, and that Spain was not 
to be appeased by a paper constitution or to 
be held down by an ill-compacted army of 
raw recruits. 

The Spanish rising was the first example of 
a long series of popular and national move- 
ments which ultimately shattered the Napo- 
leonic Empire. The extreme difficulties of 
Spanish geography, the barrenness of the 
central plateau, the fact that all the mountain 
chains run across the line of advance from 
Bayonne to Cadiz, the badness and paucity 
of the roads, the river system, which is an 
obstacle not an aid to communication, these 
circumstances rendered Spain the ideal coun- 
try in which to fight a defensive and guerilla 
war. And there was another element of mis- 
fortune for Napoleon in the struggle which he 



178 NAPOLEON 

had so wantonly provoked. The Peninsular 
War gave to the small land-army of Great 
Britain just the theatre in which it could be 
most effectively employed. Instead of wast- 
ing the military strength of the country on 
purposeless campaigns in malarious sugar 
islands, the Portland Cabinet wisely resolved 
that the British army should act in conjunc- 
tion with the native movements in Portugal 
and Spain. It was a momentous resolution, 
for while Wellesley's army gave the necessary 
stiffening to the valiant but ill-organised re- 
sistance of the Spanish people, the British 
operations were powerfully assisted by the 
scattered diversions of their allies. The first 
blow, struck at Vimiero on August 21, 1808, 
should have been accepted as an omen, for the 
thin red line under Wellesley's skilful hand- 
ling routed Junot's army and cleared Portu- 
gal of the French. 

Napoleon refused to read the signals. All 
through the war he persistently underrated 
the difficulties of Spanish geography, and 
constantly gave instructions to his lieuten- 
ants compliance with which was physically 
impossible. His confidence was probably 
confirmed by the brilliant results of a brief 
winter campaign, 1808-9, when, advancing at 
the head of a superb army of 200,000 men, he 
shattered the Spanish resistance in the north, 
restored King Joseph to Madrid and chased 
Sir John Moore over the plain of Leon to the 
foot of the Galician hills. But there was no 
real ground for satisfaction. The Emperor 



THE FIRST CHECK 179 

would have been wise to accept the omens of 
Baylen and Vimiero, and to have confined his 
operations to the country north of the Ebro. 
As it was, his dashing intrusion committed 
him to the continuance of a war which con- 
sumed his best armies, weakened his military 
hold on Prussia and gave infinite encourage- 
ment to all his enemies in Europe. 

Nothing is more characteristic of Napoleon 
than the fact that while the Spanish project 
was maturing in his brain he should have 
reopened proposals to Russia both for a 
partition of Turkey and for a joint expedition 
across the Euphrates to attack the Indian 
possessions of King George. He viewed 
Spain, with its large seaboard and numerous 
harbours, as an element of marine power 
second only to Italy, and therefore as likely 
to contribute to the downfall of England. 
Cadiz was a key to Calcutta. But the Span- 
ish revolt altered the complexion of affairs and 
gave a new turn to diplomacy. The partition 
of Turkey, which had been dangled before the 
eyes of Russia and even of Austria, faded 
together with the Indian project out of the 
canvas of practical politics. For Napoleon 
the main object was so to refresh the alliance 
of Tilsit as to keep Austria quiet until such 
time as he could settle his account with the 
wayward population of Spain. The Tsar 
was invited to a conference in Germany 
specially arranged to exhibit Napoleon in his 
new role of patron and protector of the 
German princes. Alexander came to Erfurt 



180 NAPOLEON 

(September 28, 1808), his unreserved enthusi- 
asm for Napoleon now somewhat strained 
with suspicion, but nevertheless signed a 
secret deed promising help should Austria be 
the first to draw the sword. The cracks were 
plastered up for the moment, but no discern- 
ing eye could fail to perceive that the weights 
and measures of Europe had altered since 
Tilsit, that the Franco-Russian alliance was 
wearing thin, and that while Napoleon was 
confronted with fresh perplexities, the Tsar, 
who had made himself master of Finland and 
the Danubian principalities, had materially 
advanced in power. 

The most palpable result of the Spanish 
imbroglio was to reopen the ancient quarrel 
with Austria. Francis could hardly be ex- 
pected to look with gentle curiosity at the 
dethronement of the Spanish Bourbons. 
There is a sense of comradeship, a kind of 
tacit trades union, among crowned heads 
which renders the misfortunes of kings 
especially significant and lamentable to their 
brethren. The art of dethronement which 
had been practised with success in Turin, 
Brunswick, Cassel, Florence, Naples and 
Bayonne might receive a crowning illustration 
in Vienna. In the Spanish case it had been 
shown that neither weakness nor compliance 
was a safeguard against Napoleon's ambition. 
And if the Emperor was liable to dethrone his 
confederate in arms, what reason was there 
to think that he would spare a neutral? A 
new spirit began to stir in Austria, evidenced 



THE FIRST CHECK 181 

by the formation of a national militia and 
quickened by the tidings of the Spanish re- 
volt. In December 1808 it was determined to 
take advantage of Napoleon's commitments 
in Spain and to declare war in the following 
spring. Three men were the shaping forces 
of the policy — the Archduke Charles, Count 
Stadion, and a young ambassador who had 
just learnt to know Napoleon in Paris, and 
was destined to play a large part in securing 
his overthrow. His name was Metternich, 
and seeing that for more than a generation 
that name stood for conservative repression 
in Europe, it is well to remember that Metter- 
nich's political barque was first launched on 
the tide of a popular and national movement. 
Napoleon was now thirty-nine years of age. 
He had grown stout, but his health was good 
and his activity and endurance were as tre- 
mendous as ever. In his fierce pursuit of Sir 
John Moore he had crossed the Guadarrama 
on foot at the head of his troops in a blinding 
blizzard, and covered 214 miles in twelve days 
under a December sky and to the accompani- 
ment of frost and snow. His ride back from 
Valladolid to Paris in less than six days was 
a feat hardly less creditable to his capacity 
for long bouts of swift and arduous travel. 
The old confidence was as high as in the golden 
days of Egypt. On paper his army stood at 
800,000; and though 300,000 veterans were 
locked up in Spain, with his "little conscripts, 
his name and his long boots," he felt that he 
had nothing to fear from the Austrians. 



182 NAPOLEON 

Above all the long boots! If the war of 
1809 failed to develop into a general struggle 
for the liberation of Germany the result was 
due to the wonderful rapidity with which 
Napoleon struck at the Austrians on the 
middle Danube and hurled them back upon 
Vienna before the fire of revolt had caught 
hold of the north. With his capacity for 
isolating the relevant issue he discerned that 
the spine of resistance in Central Europe was 
the Austrian army, and that if this could 
be effectually broken a general paralysis of 
German and Tyrolese patriotism would be 
likely to set in. Yet at the very outset of the 
campaign his success was nearly compromised 
by the faulty dispositions of Berthier, a su- 
perb chief of the staff, but no general. Napo- 
leon had directed a concentration upon Ratis- 
bon, but had added the injunction that, 
should the Austrians cross the Inn before 
April 15 the army was to fall back upon the 
Lech. The first part of the order had been 
partially carried out and Davotit's corps had 
descended upon Ratisbon, when on April 16, 
the Archduke Charles at the head of a power- 
ful army 126,000 strong forced the passage of 
the Isar. The situation of the French was one 
of the most extreme peril. Davout was at 
Ratisbon, Berthier seventy-six miles away to 
the west at Augsburg, and between the two 
main segments of the army there was only a 
weak Bavarian corps at Abensberg. Had the 
Archduke risen to the occasion he could have 
overwhelmed Bavoiit's 60,000 men before 



THE FIRST CHECK 



183 




184 NAPOLEON 

assistance could have reached him, and then 
marched on the crushed Berthier. But 
while the Archduke was marking time, 
Napoleon was flying "with his long boots" 
to the scene of action. He had heard of the 
declaration of war in Paris on April 12 at 
eight p.m., and at four a.m. on the 17th was 
at Donauworth and in command of the situa- 
tion. The manoeuvres which he then pro- 
ceeded to carry out, though not perfect in 
every detail, have received the admiration of 
most military critics, and were considered 
by Napoleon himself to be his finest exploit 
in war. Ordering Davout with the left wing 
to fall back and Massena with the right wing 
to advance, he brought the scattered frag- 
ments of his army together and then pro- 
ceeded to crush the enemy in detail. First 
the Austrian right was stunned at Abensberg, 
then the left was thrown back in confusion 
across the Isar at Landshut. Finally Napo- 
leon came up to the rescue of Davout, who 
was struggling with the superior forces of the 
Archduke at Eggmuhl, and turned the for- 
tunes of the day. The Austrians fell back 
upon Ratisbon, fought an action on the fol- 
lowing day (April 23), and then withdrew 
across the Danube, damaged but not demor- 
alised by the loss of 50,000 lives in this 
extraordinary five days' campaign. It was 
the victory of lightning improvisation over 
hesitating tactics. When Napoleon learnt 
on the 18th that the Archduke after crossing 
the Isar had deviated to the north from the 



THE FIRST CHECK 185 

straight line of advance, "he drew himself up, 
his eye glittered, and with a joy that betrayed 
itself in glance, voice and gesture, he ex- 
claimed, ' Then I have them ! Their army is 
lost! We shall be in Vienna in a month !'" 
The Emperor was modest; three weeks after- 
wards he slept in the palace of Schonbrunn. 
The next scene of the drama is enacted on 
the banks of the rushing Danube a few miles 
below Vienna, where the stream is divided 
by the large wooded island of Lobau. In 
Napoleon's own words, "to cross a river like 
the Danube in the presence of an enemy 
knowing the ground thoroughly and having 
the sympathies of the inhabitants is one of 
the most difficult military operations con- 
ceivable." Since Austria might gain and 
France would certainly lose by delay, this 
most difficult operation had to be attempted. 
On the night of May 21, the corps of Massena 
and Lannes with the Guards and the light 
horse crossed over from the island to the 
northern bank, and there met with a recep- 
tion calculated to quail any ordinary troops. 
For a whole day 36,000 Frenchmen hung on 
to the villages of Aspern and Essling, fighting 
desperately against superior numbers, and cut 
off from support by the destruction of the 
bridges. On the night of the 22nd reinforce- 
ments were sent across, but not in sufficient 
power to turn the scale. After another day 
of fierce and indecisive combat Napoleon with- 
drew his troops to the island. In the confused 
fighting at Aspern and Essling he had lost 



186 NAPOLEON 

Lannes, the bravest of the brave, and shown 
Europe at last that he was not invincible. 

The blow which finally decided the war 
was struck seven weeks later in the same 
place, and is known to history as the battle 
of Wagrani. With an army greatly reinforced 
and exceeding that of his adversary by twenty 
per cent, Napoleon crossed the Danube on 
the night of July 5, and on the following 
day shook out his troops for a battle. The 
event proved that Austrian valour was no 
accident, nor French pre-eminence a neces- 
sity of nature. At the end of a fierce struggle 
begun in the dawn of a July morning and 
sustained until the afternoon, the Archduke 
Charles withdrew from the field beaten but 
not broken, and leaving neither prisoner 
nor flag in the enemy's hands. It was 
the Archduke and not the Austrian private 
who was really defeated, the gunners of 
Napoleon rather than his infantry who won 
the day. Indeed the Grand Army was no 
longer the splendid instrument of earlier 
times. Its flower was wasting in Spain; and 
a discreditable panic on the afternoon of the 
fight at the rumoured approach of the Arch- 
duke John exhibited the gulf which divided 
the young conscripts of Wagram from the 
tried veterans of Areola and Austerlitz. 

For the next four months a truce was 
observed between the two Emperors, during 
which either party anxiously watched the 
struggles which were proceeding in other 
parts of Europe, in the hopes of some decisive 



THE FIRST CHECK 187 

declaration of fortune. The two principal 
dangers for Napoleon were either that Prussia 
should declare war, or that the Tsar, whose 
military support had been of the most luke- 
warm description, should decide to break off 
the unpopular alliance with France. Another 
but more remote peril was a grave disaster in 
Spain or a British descent upon the Baltic 
coast, so timed as to precipitate and direct 
the gathering volume of North German dis- 
content. But as summer melted into autumn 
all these clouds passed away. The Prussians 
would not fight, and the Russian alliance was 
for the present retained by the promise of 
part of Galicia to be ceded by the Austrians. 
From the distant valley of theTagus came the 
news, eagerly interpreted as most favourable 
to the French, that Wellesley after a battle 
at Talavera had retired on Portugal. And 
meanwhile an English expedition nominally 
directed against Antwerp, but allowed to 
waste its strength in the malarious swamps 
of Walcheren, served no useful purpose save 
to give Napoleon a pretext for raising fresh 
troops. Three risings in North Germany, rash, 
heroic and disjointed, were crushed one by one; 
and with sickness breaking out in his army, 
Francis eventually was brought to his knees. 
In the course of the negotiations Napoleon 
had openly hinted that Francis should abdi- 
cate the throne. "I want to deal with a 
man," he said to Prince Lichtenstein, "who 
has the gratitude to leave me alone for the 
rest of my life. Lions and elephants have 



188 NAPOLEON 

often shown striking proofs of the power of 
sentiment upon the heart. Your master alone 
is not susceptible to sentiment." It must 
be admitted that the Austrian Emperor, 
whose palace was in the occupation of his 
rival, fell short of the shining example of the 
grateful quadrupeds. In the end he was de- 
spoiled of territory carrying a population of 
some four million souls, and including the 
great harbour of Trieste and the littoral round 
the head of the Adriatic. And besides these 
material losses there was a note of ignominy 
in the treaty which was signed at Vienna on 
October 14, 1809; for the gallant Tyrolese, 
who had risked everything to return to 
their old allegiance, were abandoned by their 
master to the vengeance of Napoleon. 

The peace was followed at no long interval 
by the most remarkable political marriage in 
modern history. On his return to Paris 
Napoleon divorced Josephine and asked and 
obtained the hand of an Austrian Arch- 
duchess. The reason of state which governed 
his action was not to be deflected by the tears 
and entreaties of an affectionate woman 
whom he had once passionately adored and 
for whom he still cherished a tender sentiment. 
Josephine had borne him no children, and 
since the Empire demanded an heir, the obse- 
quious Senate decreed that the marriage was 
dissolved, and the Bishop's Court in Paris, 
with a grander audacity, decided that it had 
never taken place at all. The choice of an 
appropriate substitute was for some time in 



THE DOWNFALL 189 

the balance, and simultaneous negotiations 
were opened out with the courts of Vienna 
and St. Petersburg. In the end Napoleon 
decided for Marie Louise of Austria, partly 
because she was already of marriageable age, 
partly because she was a Catholic, and partly 
because he had experienced the reluctance 
and anticipated the refusal of the Russian 
court. When Lacuee, the Minister of War, 
urged in opposition that Austria was no 
longer a great power, Napoleon interjected, 
"Then it is clear that you were not at Wa- 
gram." It was natural to argue from the 
evidence of the recent campaign that the 
Austrian alliance would be a pillar of strength 
to the uncertain fabric of the French Empire. 
So the little Corsican adventurer married 
himself into the proudest house in Europe, a 
wedding bringing in its train a long cloud of 
evils, for the woman proved faithless and her 
country hostile, while the son of the marriage, 
half-Hapsburg, half-Bonaparte, dragged out 
an empty and miserable life among the 
enemies of his father's name. 

CHAPTER IX 

THE DOWNFALL 

The downfall of Napoleon is a trilogy of 
which Moscow, Leipzig and Fontainebleau 
are the successive pieces and Waterloo the 
epilogue. Both in respect of the efforts put 
out and the sacrifice endured there is in this 
concluding struggle a sense of hugeness and 



190 NAPOLEON 

desperation which has struck the imagination 
of posterity as exceeding the standard even 
of that age of blood. The powers actively 
engaged are more numerous, the armies are 
larger, the loss in battle or through privation 
more appalling than in any previous cam- 
paign. The casualties in the battle of the 
Borodino are reckoned at 80,000, the destruc- 
tion at Leipzig at 120,000, and even when 
Napoleon had been driven back across the 
Rhine with the loss of hard on a million men, 
it cost a score of engagements to bring him to 
the point of abdication. That was an age 
before telegraphs, telephones or railways or 
any energetic action of the public Press upon 
the mind of man. Nations were less quickly 
moved to wrath or suspicion. Opinion 
changed more slowly. It was more difficult to 
arouse and organise for the effective purposes 
of war the resentments of a people. Yet in 
those days of slow travel and imperfect com- 
munication the force of a single will set all 
Europe in movement, drove French peas- 
ants to Moscow, and drew Cossacks and 
Kalmucks to Paris in a collision which in- 
volved the fortunes and enlisted the passions 
of the ten leading peoples of the Old World. 
It is a truism to point out that the moral 
of this titanic trilogy is the victory of the 
national spirit over the alien tyranny which 
educates and fosters its destroyer. In Spain, 
Russia and England, latterly also in Prussia, 
Napoleon came across a force imponderable 
by his scales and measures, and possessing, as 



THE DOWNFALL 191 

it proved, infinite powers of recovery and 
recoil. He knew the insurrection of the 
streets and how, as in Paris, Pavia or Cairo, 
the dust could be laid by a whiff of grape-shot. 
It was one of his few delusions that popular 
movements were all of this kind, shallow, 
timid, easily quelled at the first show of mili- 
tary resolution. In Spain he judged that 
nothing was serious but the English army; in 
South Italy that a few burnings and shootings 
would quiet the Calabrians. In one of his 
letters he says lightly, "We must denational- 
ise Germany," as though a great people could 
be drilled out of its old civilisation as easily 
as a recruit out of his slouching ways upon 
parade. There is no mood if it be long sus- 
tained more dangerous to the intelligence 
than the imperative. The exercise of des- 
potic power, with the crushing* work which it 
entailed, was good neither for Napoleon's 
mind nor for his character. He became less 
amenable to advice, more irritable, more 
intolerant of variance, and in the succession 
of his Foreign Ministers, Talleyrand, Cham- 
pagny, Maret, each less able and independent 
than the last, we have an index of the 
growing divergence between the policy of the 
Empire and the interests of France. 

Napoleon's catastrophe was the logical 
consequence of the continental system, to 
the completion of which he devoted the 
greater part of his energy during the two 
years which followed the Wagram campaign. 
The scheme of closing the whole Continent to 



192 NAPOLEON 

English and colonial goods involved not only 
an extended plan of conquest, but led Napo- 
leon to incorporate in France Holland, the 
Hanse towns and the Duchy of Oldenburg. 
But apart from the general resentment and 
alarm caused by these transactions, the block- 
ade carried with it privations which came 
home to every household. Goethe, being a 
poet and a philosopher, wrote of Napoleon as 
a kind of apostle of the higher civilisation, 
but if it were an inseparable part of the apos- 
tolic process that tobacco should be at famine 
prices, coffee and sugar unobtainable, that 
ships should rot in harbour, and that firm 
after firm should put up its shutters and 
discharge its hands, we may well imagine 
that beings less philosophical and poetical 
than Goethe saw nothing in Napoleon's 
proceedings but cruel tyranny and senseless 
waste. Everywhere the blockade meant 
loss and discomfort; in commercial com- 
munities like Holland and the grand-duchy 
of Berg it spelt widespread ruin. And save for 
the conscription, there was no feature of his 
policy which contributed to make Napoleon's 
rule so unpopular in Europe. 

If the system had been executed with per- 
fect rigour, it might perhaps have produced 
the desired effect. England's great wealth 
did not, as Napoleon erroneously believed, 
depend wholly upon commerce, but was in 
the main the fruit of her manufacturing 
energy. The weak spot in her economy was 
that her population had grown so fast that 



THE DOWNFALL 19S 

from time to time she was dependent upon 
continental wheat. If then all foreign sup- 
plies of cereals had been cut off from the 
English market it is possible that the country 
might have been compelled by sheer starva- 
tion to sue for peace. This course, however, 
was not adopted, and the French exporters 
were permitted under special licence to send 
their corn across the Channel. In view of the 
very considerable amount of trade done under 
these special licences and the great activity 
of the smuggler, it is not surprising that the 
blockade failed to achieve its end. The 
matter for wonder is that Napoleon should 
have continued to believe that by framing 
edicts against her merchandise, each more 
rigorous than the last, and all impossible of 
exact execution, he would be able in the end 
to drive England to submission. 

For this among other reasons, the most 
important of which was his marriage, he 
abandoned his first intention of returning 
to Spain. He convinced part of his mind that 
with an extra turn of the commercial screw 
the Peninsular War would be drained at its 
source. In his place he sent Massena, the 
ablest of his marshals, to effect the conquest 
of Portugal; but he neither placed him in sole 
command of all the French forces in Spain, 
nor furnished him with an adequate army, 
nor allowed him untrammelled freedom of 
action. It was given to Massena on the 
heights of Bussaco, before the lines of Torres 
Vedras and in his winter bivouac atSantarem, 



194 NAPOLEON 

to discover what Napoleon had not even 
surmised, that a Portuguese army could be 
trained to face fire, and that in the systematic 
devastation of the whole country Wellington 
had a crushing reply to the French system of 
campaigning without magazines. The inva- 
sion was rolled back and Portugal was saved. 
In April 1811 Massena's army recrossed the 
Spanish frontier, an angry, mutinous, demor- 
alised rabble, without munitions, uniforms or 
trains, having lost thirty-eight per cent of its 
numbers, and by its signal repulse testified 
to the skill of Wellington, the unwisdom of 
Napoleon, and to the final breakdown of the 
attempt to force Portugal into the ring of the 
continental blockade. 

A more serious catastrophe threatened the 
scheme from the opposite end of Europe. The 
development of Napoleon's policy had stead- 
ily weakened the Franco-Russian alliance. 
From the beginning the Tsar had felt uneasy 
at the harsh treatment meted out to Prussia, 
and at the encouragement which the creation 
of the grand-duchy of Warsaw afforded to the 
national aspirations of the Poles. He had 
accepted an alliance, unpopular with the Rus- 
sian aristocracy, still more unpopular with 
the Russian merchants, partly under the spell 
of Napoleon's personality, partly to work off 
a temporary irritation against England, and 
also in the expectation that Napoleon's friend- 
ship might serve his Oriental designs. The 
strain of circumstance soon wore off the gloss 
and revealed the seams. The Spanish revolt 



THE DOWNFALL 195 

deferred the partition of Turkey to the Greek 
Kalends, and in the war of 1809 Russia, being 
compelled to fight Austria against the natural 
leaning of her sympathies, afforded a very 
lukewarm measure of assistance to the French. 
Nobody was so quick as Napoleon to discern 
a coming change in the atmospheric pressure 
of Europe. Though the Tsar was rewarded 
for his services in the campaign by a portion 
of Galicia, the greater part of that country 
was, under the Treaty of Vienna, presented 
to the Poles, to that nation of mounted 
swordsmen whose alliance it would be so need- 
ful for Napoleon to obtain in a Russian war. 
To the Chancellery of St. Petersburg this 
augmentation of the grand-duchy of Warsaw 
was full of evil omen, and Napoleon was asked 
for a public pledge that he would never con- 
sent to the revival of the kingdom of Poland. 
Such a pledge he refused to give, feeling that 
a war with Russia was probable, and that in 
that event Polish patriotism would help him 
to victory. Had he been without an ally on 
the Continent he might perhaps have walked 
more circumspectly, but the husband of 
Marie Louise felt that he was under no com- 
pulsion to trim his sails to the Russians. 

All this friction need not have led to war. 
The breach came from the fact that, for 
financial reasons, it was no longer possible 
for Russia to adhere to the policy of the 
blockade. When in the middle of October 
1810 Napoleon requested the Tsar to lay an 
embargo on all ships in Russian waters flying 



196 NAPOLEON 

a neutral flag he was met by a refusal. Russia 
could not dispense with colonial produce, and 
the ships which carried it to her ports flew 
neutral flags. At the end of December 1810 
a ukase was issued facilitating the entrance 
of neutral ships into Russian ports, and im- 
posing heavy duties upon the wines and silks 
which formed the principal articles of French 
export. In this revolution of the Russian 
fiscal system Napoleon saw an ill-concealed 
declaration of hostility. 

Some historians have urged that the war 
was inevitable, others have put the blame 
upon the Tsar. All wars are inevitable, if 
we accept as part of an inflexible order of 
nature the characters and actions of those who 
cause them. Napoleon being what he was, 
and the Tsar being what he was, and the 
circumstances of international trade and 
finance being what they were at that time, it 
is easy to show that the war must have come. 
In itself, however, there is nothing in the tariff 
revolution of another country which need 
bring on a war. Russia had a perfect right, 
finding herself saddled with a deficit, to alter 
her tariff in accordance with her domestic 
needs, and Napoleon had no right to interfere 
with her. The collision arose not because the 
Tsar was spoiling for a fight, but because 
Napoleon chose to regard any breach in the 
continental blockade as a stab to his Empire 
and security. 

The state of Napoleon's mind in the year 
of preparation which preceded the Russian 



THE DOWNFALL 197 

campaign is a conclusive proof that lie had 
no anxiety to avoid the arbitrament of war. 
He thought and spoke of the coming venture 
not as if a real impediment to European peace 
had arisen which it was his painful duty to 
remove, but with the zest and exhilaration 
of a pirate at the sudden unfolding of new 
prospects of conquest and plunder. "People 
will want to know where we are going," he 
said; "we are going to make an end of 
Europe, and then to throw ourselves like 
robbers on other robbers less daring than 
ourselves and become masters of India." He 
began to equip expeditions for Egypt and the 
Cape. To Narbonne he spoke of Moscow as 
the half-way house to India, and of the 
Russian war as but the opening stage of the 
great triumphal progress through the East. 
As early as 1804 he confessed that he was 
weary of old Europe. He now said that in 
three years he would bemaster of the universe. 
It has been brought against Napoleon's 
character for sane strategy that he should 
have seriously attempted the conquest of a 
country like Russia, where even more than in 
Spain it is true to say that small armies are 
beaten and large armies starve. There was, 
however, a contingency which had already 
occurred once, and might therefore not 
impossibly occur again, in which the stroke 
would succeed — a big victory near the frontier 
followed by a precipitate peace. Napoleon, 
while he spared no pains in military and 
diplomatic preparations, counted on the 



198 NAPOLEON 

weakness of the Tsar to extricate him from 
the insoluble riddle of a campaign against a 
desert. He misjudged the temper of his rival 
and found himself confronted by a strategy 
of evasion, so devised as to cheat him of battle 
and to entice his cumbersome army into the 
heart of a wilderness. In a moment of doubt- 
ful wisdom he was pricked on to pursue, but 
had the Tsar listened to his overtures from 
Moscow, posterity would have been spared 
the severest of those long military homilies 
which are so ceaselessly addressed to his shade. 
Whatever may be its shortcomings in 
strategy, the Russian expedition of 1812 will 
always stand out as the supreme example 
of military tyranny in Europe. This was not 
a quarrel between two nations, but a conflict 
between the ambition of one man and the 
patriotism of a great and religious people. 
The French public, which was not informed of 
the war until ten days after it had begun, 
received the news with trained acquiescence. 
Napoleon was calm and serene. If he had 
failed to secure the Swede and the Turk, he 
had taken means to excite the enthusiasm of 
the Poles, and had extracted from Austria 
and Prussia two serviceable contingents to 
guard his flanks. In the centre he had 
gathered an army such as he had never yet 
commanded, a miscellaneous host of over 
600,000 men, recruited by methods hardly 
differing from the slave raid, and two-thirds 
drawn, since the best French troops were 
serving in Spain, from the conquered or allied 



THE DOWNFALL 199 

territories of the Empire. Yet this motley 
assemblage of Germans, Italians, Dutchmen 
and Poles, marched, fought and bled under 
their French officers for Napoleon. There 
was neither mutiny nor failure of persistence, 
and if the Grand Army of Russia perished in 
its attempt, the disaster is not to be traced to 
the troops, but to causes too deeply graven 
on the face of Nature and the moral being of 
man for any human tyranny, however power- 
ful, to control them. 

Napoleon's original plan was to devote two 
years to the campaign. In the first he would 
bring the Russians to bay in Lithuania, in 
the second he would advance from Smolensk 
to Moscow. With this design in view he could 
afford to be punctilious in preparation and to 
postpone the opening of hostilities till the 
month of June, when the plains of Lithuania 
would provide fodder for his horse. If the 
Tsar had waited in the entrenched camp at 
Drissa, which he had been advised to prepare 
in foolish imitation of Wellington's lines of 
Torres Vedras, the game would have been 
won by Napoleon. But here by a singular 
paradox the French were injured and the 
Russians helped by the immense superiority 
of the invading army. Eager as they were 
to try conclusions with the enemy, the Rus- 
sian generals had no option but to retreat be- 
fore a force more than three times as numer- 
ous as their own. Napoleon's army, 610,000 
strong, which trailed behind it a commissariat 
proportionate to its wants, was neither sue- 



200 NAPOLEON 

cessful in envelopment nor agile in pursuit; 
and in the middle of August the Emperor 
found himself at Smolensk, at the eastern end 
of a barren and wasted country, his army 
diminished by 100,000 men and with no 
decisive victory to his credit. There in the 
burning wreck of Smolensk and on the 
threshold of autumn he took the momentous 
resolve of pressing on to Moscow. He pre- 
ferred to play for all or nothing rather than 
face an ignominious retreat or the wasting 
inaction of a Lithuanian winter. The Russian 
army under Kutusoff, the old bull-dog patriot 
who had at last been summoned by the 
nation's voice to save his country, threw 
itself across his path and fought the battle 
which Tolstoy has described in his immortal 
prose. The carnage of Borodino opened for 
Napoleon the way to Moscow, but did noth- 
ing to abate the obstinate resolve of his op- 
ponent. Kutusoff withdrew to a position not 
far south of the capital, from which like a bird 
of prey he might pounce down upon the de- 
composing body of the French army. The 
taking of Moscow, so far from helping Napo- 
leon, only served to whet the anger of the 
Russians. He found a city practically bare of 
its inhabitants and designed to destruction 
by the patriotic malevolence of its governor. 
Fires broke out here, there, everywhere, upon 
a plan too comprehensive to be entirely ex- 
plained by the careless torch of the plundering 
soldier. Yet here in a dismal mass of charred 
and blackened ruins he stayed till October 18, 



THE DOWNFALL 201 

legislating for the French theatre, and hoping 
that Alexander would capitulate. When he 
began his retreat it was a full month too late, 
and though the snows were tardy that autumn, 
they were early enough to play havoc with the 
ragged and footsore host which sped miserably 
homewards before the lances of the pursuing 
Cossacks. When the pursuit ended on the 
Niemen, which was then the western frontier 
of the Russian Empire, more than 500,000 
men of the Grand Army had disappeared. 

The second part of the trilogy was played 
in Germany, and while it exhibits Napoleon 
in a grand and desperate passage of his life, 
forms also a notable chapter in the develop- 
ment of the German nation. Since one army 
had been completely destroyed, it was neces- 
sary if the advanced positions of the Empire 
were to be held to create another in its place. 
With her population of thirty-six millions, 
France must have contained, even allowing 
for the wastage of recent wars, some two and 
a half million men of the fighting age. But of 
these how many could be raised at short 
notice, for a distant struggle, and with a 
competent equipment? By heroic efforts 
Napoleon was able in the course of four 
months, and without any of the modern aids 
to mobilisation, to put into the field in Ger- 
many 226,000 men and 457 guns; and this 
achievement, which alone would suffice to 
make the reputation of a modern War Minis- 
ter, was accomplished at the end of an ardu- 
ous and harrowing campaign and as an item 



202 NAPOLEON 

in the government of a great Empire. This 
done he hurried to the front to direct opera- 
tions of more than ordinary perplexity, for in 
addition to the avenging army of the Tsar, 
Prussia had entered the lists against him, and 
a reverse might lose him the neutrality of 
Austria and the support of the Rhenish 
Confederation. 

His first two battles were empty victories. 
At Lutzen near Leipzig, and again at Bautzen 
in Silesia, he encountered with a great superi- 
ority of numbers a mixed force of Prussians 
and Russians and failed to gain a decisive 
advantage. The reason must not be sought 
in any obscuration of his special powers. 
There are signs of a fatigued will in the later 
but not in the opening stages of this campaign. 
It is the prime business of a general to arrive 
upon the field of battle with a force superior 
to his adversary and to compel an engagement 
while the odds are in his favour. At Lutzen 
and at Bautzen Napoleon triumphantly 
achieved this most difficult of all operations. 
His eye for ground was as quick, his gift of 
leadership as inspiring, as ever. When the 
third corps was reeling under the attack at 
Lutzen he galloped up with the young Guard 
behind him, a brilliant apparition, and re- 
stored the courage of the broken troops. 
Indeed the mere fact that an army of young 
recruits, whose sole military training had been 
gained in the course of their march to the 
front, could be induced to take the tremen- 
dous punishment of those two hard-fought 



THE DOWNFALL 203 

fields is in itself evidence of the unremitting 
pressure of a directing will. The battles were 
simply indecisive because Napoleon was too 
weak in cavalry to pursue. 

Such a success was not solid. Though he 
had pushed the enemy out of Saxony and 
Silesia and won two stricken fields, Napoleon 
was conscious that without great reinforce- 
ments, especially in the cavalry arm, he could 
deal no decisive blow. His marshals were 
tired of war, his unripe army wasted by death, 
sickness or desertion to half its strength, his 
cavalry entirely insufficient. He could no 
longer count upon the friendship, and argued 
that, unless he took prompt and minatory 
methods, he might have to reckon with the 
hostility of the Austrian Empire. That 
Power was busily arming in Bohemia, and 
was prepared to allow Napoleon to have peace 
if he would surrender his Illyrian provinces 
and retreat from his Polish and German 
conquests. Such terms were too insulting 
to be considered, but if an army could be 
brought from Italy to Laybach the Austrians 
might be frightened out of their insolence. 
With such ideas in view, Napoleon signed, on 
June 4, an armistice of two months at Plas- 
witz. It was never his intention to abandon 
his conquests, and if he was willing to encour- 
age the palaver of peace it was only that he 
might have time to hale fresh conscripts to the 
slaughter-ground. The most famous passage 
in the memoirs of Metternich recounts how 
on June 26 the Austrian ambassador urged 



204 NAPOLEON 

Napoleon in Dresden to accept his terms and 
to give peace to Europe. "What is it you 
wish of me?" said the Emperor brusquely. 
"That I should dishonour myself? Never, — 
I shall know how to die but never yield an 
inch of territory. Your sovereigns, who are 
born on the throne, may [get beaten twenty 
times and yet return to their capitals. I can- 
not, for I rose to power through the camp." 
Metternich asked what he would do when his 
army of young conscripts had gone the way 
of the Grand Army of Russia. The Emperor 
grew pale and frowned. "You are not a 
soldier," he said brusquely. "You do not 
know what happens in the soul of a soldier. I 
have grown up on battle-fields, and a man 
such as I cares little for the life of a million 
men." And as he shouted these words he 
threw his hat into the corner of the room. 
The interview lasted till the evening. As the 
diplomatist left the room he said to Napo- 
leon, " Sire, you are lost. I felt it when I came, 
and now that I go I am certain." 

Military critics have generally condemned 
the armistice on the ground that though it 
enabled Napoleon to call up reinforcements, 
it was still more useful to his enemies. When 
hostilities reopened in August, Austria and 
Sweden were in bond with the allied sover- 
eigns, and if the Spanish and Italian armies 
be taken into account, Napoleon had some 
700,000 men to pit against the 860,000 of his 
adversaries. Whether this result should have 
been foreseen by any prudent commander in 



THE DOWNFALL 205 

Napoleon's position in the month of June is a 
matter which may admit of discussion. What 
is certain is, that when the war was renewed 
the complexion of affairs had become far less 
favourable to his chances ; for while the mass 
of his fresh troops was raw and unseasoned, 
his enemies were more numerous, better 
compacted and no less resolute than before. 

Dresden, the Saxon capital, stands on the 
Elbe, twenty miles north of the mountain 
frontier of Bohemia. Here Napoleon decided 
to take his station, not only as part of a gen- 
eral plan to defend the line of the Elbe, but 
also that he might retain the loyalty of his 
Saxon and the confidence of his Polish allies. 
Posted at this convenient centre he calcu- 
lated that he could meet the converging 
attacks of the three allied armies which were 
advancing respectively from Bohemia, Si- 
lesia and Brandenburg. But he was after- 
wards brought to acknowledge that his elec- 
tion was unfortunate, and that Dresden was 
too near the mountains to enable an army 
retreating on Bohemia to be properly cut to 
pieces before it had reached the refuge of 
intricate and intractable ground. 

And indeed the Dresden period was marked 
by a long catalogue of misfortunes. It had 
been arranged among the Allies to avoid, if 
possible, a serious collision with Napoleon 
himself, but to attack his lieutenants with 
vigour whenever they were to be found. 
This policy was almost uniformly successful. 
The contingents of Oudinot and Ney succes- 



206 NAPOLEON 

sively dispatched to meet the Army of the 
North tasted defeat at Gross Beeren and 
Dennewitz, battles which are memorable in 
the military annals of Prussia as definitely 
marking the resurgence of her glory. At the 
eastern extremity of the wide field of war, 
Bliicher, commanding the army of Silesia, 
beat Macdonald on the Katzbach. The one 
exception to this significant list of reverses 
was afforded by the earliest battle fought 
after the resumption of hostilities. The ad- 
vance of the Bohemian army upon Dresden 
on August %% was prompted by the confident 
expectation that while Napoleon was occu- 
pied against Bliicher in Silesia, the place, 
which was but slightly fortified, would be 
taken before he could return to defend it. The 
event showed the falseness of these calcula- 
tions. Schwarzenberg was as slow to advance 
as Napoleon was quick to return, and in the 
great battle fought outside the walls of Dres- 
den the defence had the advantage of the 
Emperor's inspiring direction. After two 
days' fighting, August 28 and 27, the Bohe- 
mian army was repelled towards the frontier; 
and had the victory been followed up with the 
old energy, Dresden would have ranked with 
Jena as one of Napoleon's decisive victories. 
History is, however, full of examples of great 
events affected or determined by little acci- 
dents of physical health and fitness. In the 
early stages of the movement Napoleon had 
shown his accustomed flexibility, swiftness 
and resolve. He had brought the Guards back 



THE DOWNFALL 207 

into Dresden at the rate of ninety miles in 
seventy-two hours, and on the first day of the 
battle, by a masterly economy of his reserves, 
had repulsed 150,000 men with less than half 
the number. On the second day the French 
attack, though the Emperor had received 
strong reinforcements during the night, was 
delivered with less than the accustomed vig- 
our; and the Austrian centre was still un- 
broken when at five o'clock in the evening 
Schwarzenberg, learning of the rout of his left, 
determined to retire. Then it was that Na j 
poleon, had he been in the full tide of his ener- 
gies, would have pressed on in a desolating 
and remorseless pursuit. The army of 
Bohemia was the main army of the Allies, 
composed of Austrians, Russians and Prus- 
sians, and accompanied by the three sover- 
eigns of those countries. The effect upon 
Europe of its destruction would be incalcu- 
lable, and to destroy it should have been the 
main objective of the campaign. By a com- 
bination of fortune and skill Napoleon had 
succeeded after a heavy engagement in driv- 
ing Schwarzenberg to retreat, and he should 
have spared no pains in converting the retreat 
into a rout and the rout into a capitulation. 
But rain fell in torrents on the 27th, and 
Napoleon, after five days in the saddle, was 
chilled and exhausted . When the enemy began 
to give way he considered that his work was 
over, sent for his horse, and, the rain dripping 
from his grey overcoat, rode back to Dresden. 
At seven o'clock he wrote to Berthier that the 



208 NAPOLEON 

enemy was not in retreat, and that every- 
thing led him to believe that a great battle 
would take place on the next day. Even 
when the morrow had proved this prediction 
to be false the pursuit was relinquished to 
lieutenants, and while Vandamme's corps, 
which had been sent to cut off the enemy, 
was itself enveloped and destroyed at Kulm, 
Napoleon was quietly resting in Dresden. 

By the middle of September the French 
army in Saxony had been worn down from 
400,000 to 250,000 men. Desertion was rife, 
the hospitals were filling, and the difficulties 
of commissariat, especially after Ney's defeat 
on September 6, increased with alarming 
rapidity. The only hope of success lay in 
the unlikely case that one of the allied armies 
would allow itself to be caught and destroyed 
by Napoleon before the other two could come 
to its assistance. For a month the Emperor 
marched and counter-marched, with Dresden 
as his pivot, fatiguing himself and his army 
in the vain but necessary attempt to bring 
on an engagement. A palsy of indecision 
seemed to come over him. He could not 
resolve upon a bold retreat. Eventually his 
hand was forced by the action of the Allies. 
In the last week of September Blucher broke 
out of Silesia, crossed the Elbe, joined hands 
(October 7) with the Prusso-Swedish army 
under Bernadotte, curving down from the 
north upon Napoleon's line of retreat to 
France, as Schwarzenberg, debouching from 
the Bohemian mountains, slowly circled 



THE DOWNFALL 209 

round from the south to meet him<, The first 
plan which occurred to Napoleon, as he be- 
came aware of this enveloping movement, 
was to send Murat to Leipzig to hold 
Sch warzenberg, while the main body of the 
army under his own direction essayed to bring 
destruction upon Bliicher. But it soon be- 
came apparent that Bliicher was not to be 
caught. The plan was therefore reversed, 
and on October 12, after some days of ago- 
nised perplexity, Napoleon resolved to join 
forces with Murat and to defeat the Bohe- 
mian army marching up from the south before 
Bliicher and Bernadotte came to its assist- 
ance. At noon on October 14 the Emperor 
rode into Leipzig. On the morning of the 
16th his army was concentrated for battle. 

The battle of Leipzig is one of those engage- 
ments in which an army of fixed numbers is 
pitted against an enemy which receives rein- 
forcement after reinforcement after the battle 
begins, and eventually wins an overwhelming 
victory by reason of these successive addi- 
tions to its mass. Napoleon began the battle 
with 190,000 men against 200,000, and had 
therefore on the first day, and especially in the 
early hours of the first day, a real chance of 
success. Had he concentrated on Leipzig, 
as he might well have done, in time to fight 
Sch warzenberg upon the 15th, he would have 
met an army markedly inferior to his own*, 
because its concentration was not yet com- 
plete, and would probably have won a victory. 
Or, again, his chance would have been greatly 



210 NAPOLEON 

improved if he had not chosen to leave 30,000 
men under St. Cyr in Dresden, a step against 
which he had himself tabulated a list of cogent 
objections. Still despite the depression of 
energy and incoherence of plans which had 
marked the earlier stages of his westward 
movement he had, once his mind was clear 
(October 1£), outpaced the Austrians and 
brought his men upon the field with a touch 
of the old velocity; but in one vital particular 
his calculations were mistaken. While in the 
villages south of Leipzig the battle was raging 
against Schwarzenberg, a dull boom of guns 
was suddenly heard to the north of the town. 
Napoleon galloped to the spot and found that 
Marmont was engaged with Bliicher. The 
old Prussian had marched rapidly on Leipzig 
from the north-west and began to hammer 
at the French positions with such vigour 
that it was impossible for Napoleon to with- 
draw a man for those crucial operations 
against Schwarzenberg, from which he ex- 
pected, and not without reason, to establish 
decisive advantage. 

It was a day of desperate fighting and 
memorable carnage; but when night fell 
Napoleon was a beaten man. He had failed 
to crush the Bohemian centre, or indeed to 
break at any point the circle of his foes. 
While his own losses were irreparable, Schwar- 
zenberg received strong reinforcements dur- 
ing the afternoon. In such a situation an 
indecisive action was equivalent to defeat, 
and a prudent general would have lost no 



THE DOWNFALL 211 

time in extricating his army from a position 
which every hour of delay would make more 
desperate. But to the dismayed surprise of 
his best subordinates Napoleon issued no 
order for retirement. On the next day, a wet 
Sunday, he lay in his bivouac and sent a letter 
to the Austrian Emperor proposing an armis- 
tice, and vaguely hinting at concessions. But 
his enemies knew that he was at last in their 
toils, and did not mean to be cheated of their 
prey. The overtures were spurned, and when 
the battle broke out again on the 18th, all the 
Austrian reserves were up, and Bernadotte 
had marched in with 65,000 men to help 
Bliicher on the northern side. 

Encircled by overwhelming forces but yet 
disputing every inch of the ground, the 
French were steadily pushed back upon Leip- 
zig. At four p.m. the Emperor gave orders 
for retreat, and all that night the French 
troops were crowding back into the town so 
that they might cross the Elster on the fol- 
lowing morning. The next day the rout 
began and the great river of fugitives pressed 
onwards, in indescribable confusion, towards 
and over the solitary bridge. Here seme time 
after nine o'clock General Chateau met a man 
"in a peculiar dress" standing in a little 
group. He looked like a burgher, and for all 
that he was deep in thought was whistling 
"Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre." It was the 
Emperor, and as he calmly whistled that old 
air the torment of his shattered army swept 
onwards before his eyes. 



%\% NAPOLEON 

There was nothing to be done after Leipzig 
but to capitulate to the conquerors, for at 
that central shock the whole fabric of the 
Empire came crumbling to the ground. All 
Germany rose to throw off the yoke of Na- 
poleon; even the Bavarians, suddenly ex- 
changing alliance for hostility, contested his 
retreat. Holland declared for the House of 
Orange, Naples made a treaty with Austria, 
the dream of a French kingdom in Spain 
utterly vanished as Wellington steadily drove 
Soult across the Pyrenees. In France the 
desire for peace was passionate and universal. 
The wealthy and intelligent classes of the 
nation had for many years viewed the course 
of Napoleon with anxious and disapproving 
eyes, and now that two great armies had been 
destroyed in as many years, that industry 
was at a standstill, the treasury empty and 
the country menaced by foreign invasion, 
the curse of political servitude came home to 
every thinking man with poignant force. 
Strong as was the Imperial feeling with the 
mass of the peasantry and the army, the re- 
flecting part of the nation had now surren- 
dered to liberal ideas. It wanted peace with 
honour and the national control of national 
policy. The Legislature, a body of ordinary 
but representative middle-class men, boldly 
expressed its distrust of the Government and 
desire for constitutional liberty. Napoleon 
suppressed the audacious assembly with a 
violent rebuke; but a signal had been given 
to the Allied Powers that France and Napo- 
leon were no longer in unison. 



THE DOWNFALL 213 

There is a type of character which rejects 
the thought and evidence of humiliation. In 
his cool moments Napoleon recognised that 
the confederation of the Hhine was a "bad 
calculation," the continental system "a 
chimera," and the Grand Empire a lost 
splendour never to be retrieved; but his pride 
refused to accept the award of his intellect. 
"Do you wish," he said to his Council 
of State, "to descend from the height to 
which I have raised France, to become a 
simple monarchy again instead of a proud 
Empire?" He could not bear to leave 
France weaker than he had made or found 
her; and as he thought of the defection of 
his allies a convulsion of rage would seize 
him and he vowed revenge. "Munich," he 
cried, "must burn, and burn it shall." Even 
if he were compelled to capitulate he did not 
intend to swallow his humiliation for long. 
In two years' time he would be in arms again; 
but so long as there was a chance of success 
in the field he would avoid the abasement of 
a treaty, trusting to the military errors of his 
opponents, to the defection of Austria, and 
to the insurgent valour of an invaded nation. 
His plan was to temporise in diplomacy, so 
that to the French people he might appear as 
proffering peace, while he seized every oc- 
casion of punishing the enemy. 

It was this inflexibility of temper which 
proved his ruin. It was no part of the original 
policy of the Allies to demand Napoleon's 
abdication or a change of dynasty. From 
Frankfort (November 1813) they sent an 



214 NAPOLEON 

envoy to Paris offering to treat, if he would 
accept as a basis the natural frontiers of 
France, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyre- 
nees; and later on (February 4, 1814), after 
France had been invaded and the defence had 
suffered its first important defeat, he could 
have kept his throne by the surrender of 
Belgium and Savoy and acquiescence in the 
frontiers of the old monarchy. Apart from 
the counsels of personal prudence there was a 
plain call of patriotic duty to conclude a peace. 

There was a moment after the defeat of La 
Rothiere when he seemed resolved to accept 
the inevitable, for, on February 4, he gave 
Caulaincourt carte blanche to treat with the 
Allies; but on the following morning he was 
found stretched out upon the floor sticking 
pins into a map. In the night he had heard 
that the allies had divided forces, and that 
while Schwarzenberg with the main army 
was marching on Paris by the southern route 
of the Seine, Biucher with his smaller force of 
Prussians had struck north into the valley of 
the Marne. When Maret appeared to get 
his signature for the ambassador's instruc- 
tions he saw the gleam of battle in his mas- 
ter's eye. "I mean to beat Biucher," said 
the Emperor; but although the soldier's 
judgment was confirmed by three brilliant 
victories, that business of beating Biucher 
lost Napoleon the throne of France. 

Napoleon's defensive campaign in the 
valleys of the Seine and the Marne has been 
iustly admired as an example of how a small 



THE DOWNFALL 215 

force, brilliantly and resourcefully handled, 
may, when acting on interior lines, inflict 
blow after blow upon an enemy superior in 
numbers but suffering under the evils of a 
divided command. The quick dash from 
Troyes after Bliicher, the three swift blows 
(Champaubert, Montmirail, Vauchamps) 
which headed off the Prussian advance along 
the Marne, then the dart southwards to the 
Seine and the victory over the southern van- 
guard at Montereau, such exploits (Febru- 
ary 10-17) were sufficient to show that the 
master had lost none of his daemonic craft. 
Yet these victories, though for a time they 
arrested the advance of the enemy, were not 
sufficient to decide the campaign. One at 
least of Napoleon's enemies was determined, 
come what might, to struggle through to 
Paris. Bliicher was no genius, but a rough, 
coarse, illiterate soldier with a patriotic heart 
burning to avenge the wrongs of Prussia. 
While dismay reigned in the Austrian camp 
the old Prussian was as stout as ever. He 
was not one to accept defeat. On the con- 
trary, he again pushed for the north-west, 
joined a Prusso-Russian force marching from 
Belgium under Billow, and so reinforced 
repelled Napoleon at Craonne and Laon. 
He was then in a position either to advance 
upon Paris or to join the southern army. He 
elected for the latter course, and while 
Napoleon was retreating eastwards to make 
war upon the enemy's communications, he 
came into collision at Arcis-sur-Aube with 



216 NAPOLEON 

the main body of his enemies. Thirty 
thousand men half dead with fatigue cannot 
beat a hundred thousand who are compara- 
tively fresh. Napoleon was repulsed, but 
nevertheless for a few days persevered in 
his easterly march. We may marvel at his 
infinite resource. Some critics hold that no 
course was so promising as that which he 
shaped for himself in the days immediately 
preceding and following the battle of Arcis, 
since by collecting the scattered garrisons of 
Alsace and Lorraine he could have gathered 
a formidable army with which to break the 
communications and promote the division of 
the Allies. However this may be, the plan 
was abandoned; and hearing that the in- 
vaders were marching on Paris, Napoleon 
determined to fight his last battle before the 
capital. But the enemy had three days' start, 
and before Napoleon could throw himself into 
the city, Paris had capitulated to the Tsar. 

Thus headed off from the capital of the 
country, he repaired to the castle of Fontaine- 
bleau, eager, did the marshals support hinij 
to continue the struggle against the peace ol ! 
Europe and the solid interests of France, 
But the marshals were tired of the desperate 
cause and anxious to secure their fortunes, 
before it was too late. Posterity will hardly 
condemn these valiant and faithful men for 
advising abdication, seeing that it was de- 
manded by the sovereigns, enacted by the* 
Senate and agreeable to the opinion of Paris. 
They hoped at least that the Emperor might 



THE LAST PHASE 217 

be permitted to resign in favour of his son, 
and that the Napoleonic dynasty might still 
continue to rule in France. But the Tsar, 
whose ear had been gained by Talleyrand for 
the Bourbons, ended by demanding uncon- 
ditional surrender, and the marshals accepted 
a decision which they had tried to influence 
but were unable to overthrow. On April 6 
they pressed their reluctant master to write 
out a deed renouncing the thrones of France 
and Italy, and five days later a treaty was 
signed, awarding to Napoleon the sovereignty 
of Elba, a bodyguard and an income. There 
is a legend, which history dissolves, that on 
the eve of his departure from Fontainebleau 
he took poison. Such ignoble despair was no 
part of a character schooled in the myriad 
chances of fate. Even in this hour of deep 
humiliation he felt that his destiny was not 
yet accomplished. "I shall always," he 
said, "be an extraordinary man.''* But 
meanwhile, as he drove southwards through 
royalist Provence with a storm of curses 
round his ears, a certain cynical, inglorious 
and very gouty old gentleman who had been 
quietly residing in a pleasant country house 
among the fat pastures of Buckinghamshire 
was preparing to take up the government of 
France. 

CHAPTER X 

THE LAST PHASE 

The next episode of Napoleon's life is 
the most wonderful adventure in history. 



218 NAPOLEON 

After ten months of active government in 
his miniature kingdom he suddenly stole 
across the sea and landed with 1200 men 
upon the coast of France. Avoiding the 
hot royalism of Provence, he struck across 
mountain paths to Grenoble, and eventually, 
without a battle or a skirmish, without a shot 
exchanged or a drop of blood spilt, drove 
into Paris and resumed the government of 
the country. The troops which had been 
sent out to resist his advance were won over 
by the simple magic of his presence. When 
the men of the fifth regiment barred the defile 
of Laffray he came into their midst opening 
his grey overcoat and invited them to fire. 
"Soldiers," he said, "y° u can shoot. Do 
you not recognise me as your Emperor? Am 
I not your old general? It is not ambition 
which brings me among you. The forty-five 
best heads of the government of Paris have 
called me from Elba, and my return is sup- 
ported by the three first powers of Europe." 
The falsehoods were not perceived. Delirious 
enthusiasm greeted him along his route. 
Had he been the father of his people, crowned 
with long years of beneficent endeavour to 
ease the economic pressure on the poor, he 
could not have received a more glowing wel- 
come. The recollection of the war-taxes 
and the blockade and the holocaust of lives 
seemed suddenly to be blotted out. All sorts 
and conditions of men were fascinated by his 
address. He got out of his carriage to em- 
brace an old republican blacksmith, cross- 



THE LAST PHASE 219 

questioned a schoolboy on local history, spoke 
to a scholar of his interest in the translation 
of Strabo, to the lawyers of a contemplated 
reformation of the Codes. As the news of 
his victorious progress trickled into Paris, 
angry confidence passed by swift stages to 
anxiety, dismay and despair; so that when 
on the wet evening of March 20 Napoleon's 
carriage clattered up to the Tuileries, the old 
king and his retinue were far away and the city 
was abandoned to the servants of the Empire. 
The miracle is not to be explained by 
any deep-laid conspiracy. Napoleon escaped 
from Elba because he had within him a fund 
of unexpended energy which the petty ac- 
tivities of his tiny realm could not satisfy; 
and he succeeded in reaching Paris because 
two classes of men, the soldiers and the 
peasants, wished to see the Bourbon Govern- 
ment handsomely chastised. The monarchy 
of Louis XVIII was neither corrupt nor 
tyrannical. It stood for peace and retrench- 
ment, and permitted under the forms of 
a written constitution a far larger measure 
of political and civil liberty than had ever 
been enjoyed under the rule of Napoleon. 
No one could rightly accuse it of being malev- 
olent, or as likely to interfere with the mate- 
rial progress of the country. But being from 
the first without any deep root of national 
support, it had irritated patriotic sentiment 
by a series of injudicious measures. In par- 
ticular it had offended the army by a harsh 
and extreme policy of retrenchment, and the 



220 NAPOLEON 

peasants by the expectations which it had 
encouraged that the land-settlement of the 
Revolution would be shortly reversed. 

Against an obscurantist government con- 
ducted by a royalist clique Napoleon shone 
out as the hero of the Revolution. Every 
peasant knew that the Little Corporal would 
not require him to disgorge the lands which 
before the troubles had belonged to the 
seigneur and the abbot, and that whatever 
drawbacks might be attendant upon his rule, 
there was at least no fear of priest or SmigrS 
under Napoleon. He was the son of the 
people, who could talk their language and 
read their hearts. His image was known in 
every cottage; his victories were recounted 
again and again by every fireside. He was 
already, like Charlemagne of old, a part of 
the national legend, called by quaint endear- 
ing nicknames, and the theme of innumerable 
anecdotes. Of her new rulers, on the con- 
trary, France knew little, save that for five- 
and-twenty years they had lived in exile 
protesting against the achievements of the 
Revolution and estranged from the glories 
of the Empire. Despite all the eloquence 
of Chateaubriand, since Rousseau, the great- 
est master of French romantic prose, the old 
dynasty could not strike the imagination 
of the country. Some hated it for what it 
had been; others despised it for what it was, 
the majority feared it for what it might be- 
come. The Charter might be safe under 
Louis XVIII, but the Comte d'Artois, his 



THE LAST PHASE 221 

brother and heir, was a narrow bigot, whose 
political creed was autocracy only tempered 
by subservience to the most intolerant sec- 
tion of his Church. 

In this suspicious and irritated mood of 
the public mind Napoleon found his oppor- 
tunity. As he proceeded through France he 
spoke the language now of the Jacobin, now 
of the liberal, suiting his words to the charac- 
ter of his audience; to the peasants offering 
himself as a shield against feudal and clerical 
reaction; to the bourgeois as a retired and 
penitent conqueror whose mind was filled 
with thoughts of liberty and peace. Finding 
that nothing was so generally apprehended 
as a renewal of the war, he painted himself 
as a man who had doubtless made some mis- 
takes of ambition, but was not essentially 
wedded either to a career of foreign conquest 
or to a policy of domestic repression. 
Throughout his public life his ultimate ideal 
had been the pacific federation of Europe 
under the guiding influence of France. He 
represe n ted that he could not fairly be judged 
by institutions which had been framed in the 
torment and stress of war, or by a policy the 
harshness of which was the necessary result 
of transitional circumstances. He had hoped 
to make France mistress of Europe, but had 
been taught by calamity that this ambition, 
in which he was not alone, was overstrained. 
But part of his unfulfilled programme could 
still be executed, and he would now proceed 
to give to France those free institutions which 



222 NAPOLEON 

had hitherto been postponed through the 
exigencies of war. With these professions 
on his lips he induced Carnot, the staunch 
republican, to accept the portfolio of the 
Interior, and summoned Benjamin Constant, 
the leading liberal publicist of the day, to 
draft a constitution. 

If the Empire could really have been made 
compatible with liberty and peace, the French 
people could have had no government better 
suited to their needs. Long after Napoleon's 
death, the Church, the Codes, the University, 
substantially remained as the great architect 
had left them, and French society was 
Napoleonic under rulers who violently re- 
jected the Imperial claim. The shadow which 
obscured Napoleon's glory was the suspicion 
which had steadily grown to an awful cer- 
tainty, that war and despotism were insepar- 
able and ingrained parts of his nature. To 
efface this impression was now clearly the 
first call of prudence, and Napoleon resolved 
to invest his new liberalism with the sanction 
of a national plebiscite and the solemnity 
of a ceremonial acceptance in Paris. On 
June 1, amid a great concourse summoned 
to the Champs de Mars, the Emperor swore 
to obey the new Constitution, which had 
enacted liberty of the Press, responsibility 
of ministers and parliamentary government. 
But forms and ceremonies cannot alter facts. 
A liberal chamber could never durably coexist 
with Napoleon, and though for the moment 
the Acte Additionnel was accepted, it was 



THE LAST PHASE 223 

the Emperor's intention, as he observed at 
St. Helena, at once to dismiss the Chambers 
in the event of a victorious campaign. 

The expectation, if it were ever seriously 
entertained, that Europe, having squandered 
years of painful effort upon the conquest of 
Napoleon, would now passively acquiesce 
in his return, was swiftly and peremptorily 
dispelled. No sooner had the news of his 
escape reached Vienna than the plenipoten- 
tiaries of the eight leading powers there 
assembled declared him an outlaw, and soon 
afterwards Great Britain, Russia, Austria 
and Prussia bound themselves each to put 
150,000 men into the field and to keep them 
under arms "until Bonaparte should have 
been rendered absolutely incapable of stirring 
up further trouble." Nevertheless Napoleon 
was not without hope that he might detach 
Austria and England from the ring of his 
enemies. He knew that extreme tension 
over the destinies of Poland and Saxony 
had arisen at the Congress of Vienna between 
Prussia and Russia on the one hand, and 
Austria, England and France on the other, 
and though the question had been adjusted, 
he might reasonably expect that the feeling 
of resentment and suspicion would remain. 
To Austria, therefore, and Great Britain he 
addressed letters protesting his desire to keep 
the peace and his acquiescence in the re- 
stricted frontiers of France. His word was 
not accepted by either ruler. Indeed, had 
there ever been a chance that Austria would 



224 NAPOLEON 

alter her mind, that chance was dispelled in 
April, when Joachim Murat, acting on his 
own initiative, broke out of Naples and in- 
vaded the Papal States, calling upon the 
Italian nation to revolt and to accept him as 
king of a united Italy. 

The issue between Napoleon and Europe 
was fought out in Belgium. Here was gath- 
ered the vanguard of the Allies, a miscel- 
laneous host of English, Dutch, Belgians and 
Germans under the Duke of Wellington, and 
the more homogeneous Prussian army of 
which Bliicher was the nerve and Gneisenau 
the brain. It was inevitable that Napoleon 
should seek out his enemy in Belgium, even 
if by so doing he was compelled to act with an 
inferior force. To have waited in the heart of 
France till all the allied armies had crossed 
the frontier would have been unwise from a 
military and disastrous from a political point 
of view. It was clearly the best chance for 
Napoleon to defeat the Prussians and the 
English before the great hosts of Austria and 
Russia were ready to take the field. His 
striking force it is true, when the necessary 
deductions had been made for an insurrection 
in the Vendee and the defence of the frontiers, 
was hardly more than half the combined 
numbers of the enemy; but it was an army of 
veterans, as well schooled and as highly 
tempered as any that Napoleon had com- 
manded, and it was no rash calculation that 
with such an instrument he could defeat the 
enemy in detail, annex the Netherlands, and 



THE LAST PHASE 225 

so recover the wavering confidence of France. 
Proclamations dated from Brussels were duly 
prepared in expectation of victory. 

These proclamations were never issued. 
Yet even if the Waterloo campaign had 



*V 



CAMPAIGN or WATERLOO 
MUSSELS ****** 



Waterloo^ 

MtSK/ean\ 

J,La/faxikSa//7te 
HoagoumoftB/m \\ -rf -^ 

Amio lanchenoit 



^ iNivelTes" 1 

Gembloux 



ligny*]i Sombr * f>f * 

'/eurus Namu? 



Charleroif 



—■—■—■■— — — — — BarthohtTK.»,Estra 

been won by Napoleon, he could not have 
averted the inevitable catastrophe. The 
total mass of the allied armies, of which 
the forces stationed in Belgium were but 
a fraction, was some 800,000 men, and 
behind them were the illimitable reserves of 



226 NAPOLEON 

an indignant continent. The temper of 
Europe was such that even if France had 
retained the hot zeal of the early revolution, 
and Napoleon the matchless vigour of his 
youth, the war must have gone against him. 
But times had changed, and in the year of 
Waterloo, France (save for her small regular 
army) was a disenchanted nation and 
Napoleon an altered man, still wonderful 
in energy and resource, but less confident, 
less drastic, less continuously efficient than 
before. The old lavish tributes of men were 
not to be extracted from a country where 
the current of middle-class opinion was pro- 
nouncedly in favour of peace and liberty; 
and a hastily levied militia of sailors and 
gendarmes, national guards and customs 
officers, was no sufficient support to a regular 
army, which all Napoleon's efforts had not 
been able to increase by more than 84,000 
men. The battle of Waterloo, then, is not 
one of the decisive battles of the world in 
the sense that had the issue been other than 
it was, history would have been greatly 
changed. Before a shot had been fired, 
Napoleon was a beaten man. Yet the battle 
is justly celebrated not only as the one oc- 
casion in which Napoleon was pitted against 
the great British master of infantry warfare, 
but as marking the end of the French ascen- 
dancy in Europe and the close of that long 
struggle between the armed doctrine of the 
Revolution and the aristocratic and ecclesias 
tical traditions bequeathed from the feudal age . 



THE LAST PHASE 227 

The central factor in the Waterloo cam- 
paign is the overwhelming numerical supe- 
riority of the Allies. A French victory was 
impossible against the conjoined forces of 
Bliicher and Wellington. It was therefore 
Napoleon's plan to cut through the centre 
of the long Anglo-Prussian cordon, which was 
strung out on the Belgian frontier, and to 
destroy whichever of the two armies might 
first cross his path. The early stages in the 
development of this design were marked by 
speed, secrecy and precision, and by the 
evening of June 14, the French army was 
concentrated in the neighbourhood of Char- 
leroi, while yet the English and Prussian 
forces were scattered over a front of a hundred 
miles, extending from Liege to Ghent. Here, 
however, a delay occurred which, though not 
fatal to Napoleon's chances of success, was of 
immense value to his enemies. The passage 
of the Sambre, which should have been ac- 
complished by the early afternoon of the 15th, 
dragged on until the middle of the following 
day, so that when Napoleon was ready to join 
battle on the 16th, the alarm had been given 
and the English and Prussian armies were 
rapidly drawing together to contest his 
advance. By noon of the 16th, Bliicher had 
concentrated three out of his four army corps 
(some 90,000 men) at Ligny, while Wellington 
was hurrying up reinforcements to the de- 
fensible position of Quatre Bras, lying some 
six miles west of the Prussian lines on the 
Brussels-Charleroi road. Moreover, on that 



22S NAPOLEON 

morning the Duke had met the Prussian 
commander and had promised to march to 
his assistance provided that he were not 
attacked himself. 

It is a mark of a great general so to dispose 
the movements of his troops as to be able 
rapidly to adapt himself to any one of the 
many possible emergencies which may arise. 
When Napoleon returned to his quarters at 
Charleroi at eight p.m. on the evening of the 
15th, overcome with fatigue after seventeen 
hours in the saddle, he had the satisfaction 
of knowing that he had forced the passage of 
the Sambre and pushed back the Prussian 
outposts of Zieten's corps which had been 
sent to screen the allied position. Beyond 
this he had no certain knowledge, save that 
the four Prussian army corps were widely 
dispersed and unlikely to be collected in time 
for a battle on the following day. Accord- 
ingly he split his army into two divisions, 
giving the left wing to Ney and the right to 
Grouchy, and himself commanding a reserve 
capable of reinforcing the left or right as the 
situation should demand. Orders were sent 
to Ney to hold himself ready to push on to- 
wards Brussels by the Charleroi road, while 
the right wing was instructed to march on 
Fleurus and to attack any Prussians who 
might be found there. It was the Emperor's 
expectation that while the Prussians could not 
oppose more than 40,000 men to Grouchy ? s 
advance, Ney would find very little difficulty 
in brushing aside the easterly posts of the 



THE LAST PHASE 229 

Anglo-Dutch army. The situation would 
then develop itself in the most flattering 
manner. After the exposed Prussian corps 
had been crushed at Fleurus by the superior 
numbers of the French, the Emperor would 
strike westwards to the assistance of Ney, 
enter Brussels on the morning of the 17th, 
and then proceed to annihilate the composite 
army of the Duke of Wellington. 

Completely as this reckoning was upset 
by the rapidity of Bliicher's concentration, 
Napoleon's plans were so laid that they could 
be adjusted with even higher chances of 
success to the new conditions. Finding him- 
self unexpectedly confronted at Ligny not 
with a fraction but with the main body of the 
Prussian army; not with 40,000 men but with 
90,000; he made up his mind to envelop and 
destroy his enemy by summoning Ney, or 
some part at least of Ney's force, to leave the 
Brussels road and to sweep down upon the 
Prussian flank and rear. Meanwhile with 
his 60,000 men he would engage the Prussians, 
containing their left or easterly wing and 
briskly attacking their right and centre. The 
action began at three o'clock. "It is possi- 
ble," said the Emperor to Gerard, "that three 
hours hence the fate of the war may be 
decided. If Ney executes my orders properly 
not a single gun will escape him." 

The field of Ligny, which was the last of 
Napoleon's victories, and one of the fiercest 
in a long catalogue of savage encounters, 
practically decided the campaign. At ten 



230 NAPOLEON 

o'clock, when the last shots were exchanged, 
the Prussians had withdrawn from their 
positions "damnably mauled," as the Duke 
of Wellington had predicted they would be, 
but still an organised force capable of execut- 
ing a compact and orderly retreat. At the 
extreme end of the day, by letting loose the 
Guard at the Prussian centre, Napoleon had 
driven the enemy from the field but he had 
not gained his crushing victory. Owing to 
a long array of blunders he had been obliged 
to fight without the help of a single man from 
Ney's command. That brave and spirited 
officer, who for all his staff was compelled to 
rely upon a single aide-de-camp, had ad- 
vanced along the Brussels road with a natural 
but calamitous deliberation. When he might 
have carried the Quatre Bras position at nine 
o'clock, or even as late as eleven in the morn- 
ing — for the Prince of Orange had but 7800 
men and fourteen guns to defend it- — he 
postponed operations till the afternoon, and 
found to his cost that he was faced with an 
enemy already reinforced and destined before 
nightfall to be increased to fourfold its orig- 
inal strength. Ney, therefore, was too hotly 
engaged at Quatre Bras to do more than pre- 
vent Wellington from helping Blucher. Yet 
there was a factor in the situation which, had 
it been utilised, might have given Napoleon 
that complete victory over the Prussian army 
which was needed to decide the campaign. 
The Corps d'Armee of d'Erlon, 20,000 strong, 
belonged to Ney's command, and was tardily 



THE LAST PHASE 231 

marching on Quatre Bras, when at 4.15 p.m. 
an aide-de-camp rode up from Napoleon 
with written directions that it should forth- 
with proceed to Ligny. The four divisions 
turned eastwards and were already visible 
to Napoleon, though in an unexpected 
quarter, when a hot order from Ney demanded 
an instant return to Quatre Bras. With a 
singular lack of judgment d'Erlon obeyed his 
immediate superior, and this force of 20,000 
men, which might have given a decisive 
finish to either engagement, marched and 
countermarched between the two battle- 
fields without striking a blow. 

Up to this point Napoleon's conduct of 
the campaign had been marked by singular 
decision and brilliance. He had surprised 
his enemies by the speed and secrecy of his 
advance, had cut in at the weak point of 
junction between the hostile armies, and had 
driven off the Prussians with the loss of 
15,000 men. If Blucher had not been 
permanently crushed at Ligny, the result was 
largely due to causes beyond the Emperor's 
control, to the imperfect co-operation of 
Ney's divisions, to the error of d'Erlon, and 
to the bad staff-work in both wings of the 
army. But on the morning of the 17th, 
Napoleon fell into a mistake which was just 
as serious as Ney's dilatory advance on 
Quatre Bras or as d'Erlon's absence from the 
field of Ligny. He came to the conclusion, 
grounded on some fatal mixture of optimism, 
indisposition and fatigue, but on no serious 



232 NAPOLEON 

probing of the facts, that the Prussians had 
been finally put out of action and were 
streaming eastwards in dire confusion away 
from Wellington and down their own line 
of communications through Namur and 
Liege. His movements were accordingly 
characterised by some hours of leisurely, per- 
haps fatal, confidence. He drove round the 
battlefield, talked Paris politics with his 
generals, even contemplated resting his army 
for the day. It was not until noon that he 
issued his final instructions to Grouchy to 
follow up the Prussians with 33,000 men and 
ninety-six guns, nor did he himself join hands 
with Ney at Quatre Bras until two in the 
afternoon. Had he effected this march four 
hours earlier he could have attacked the Duke 
of Wellington, always assuming that the 
Duke had waited his attack, with an advan- 
tage of two to one. As it was he was hardly in 
time to annoy a retreat which was powerfully 
assisted by torrents of rain, and by the 
skilful handling of the British cavalry. 1 

On that drenching Saturday night the 
Duke took up his station on the Mont St. 
Jean, a low eminence eleven miles south of 
Brussels, which his fine eye had already 
selected as appropriate to his methods of 
defence. Opposite him, at a distance of 1300 
yards, a ridge known as La Belle Alliance, 
from the name of a farm on its crest, was 

1 Wellington was apprised of Ligny at 7.30 a.m. Napo- 
leon, who had heard nothing from Ney, could, after such a 
battle, hardly have moved before 8 a.m. 



THE LAST PHASE 233 

receiving all through the night successive 
increments of the weary and famished army, 
of Napoleon. In numbers and weight of 
artillery the advantage lay with the Emperor, 
who could oppose 246 guns to 184, and an 
army of 74,000 French veterans to the 67,700 
men, of whom 24,000 only were British, who 
made up the miscellaneous and disjointed 
host of the Duke of Wellington. 

The decision to defend the Mont St. Jean 
position was taken upon the assurance of 
Prussian help. Early in the morning of the 
17th Wellington had been apprised that the 
Prussians were retreating, not eastwards as 
Napoleon imagined, but northwards in the 
direction of Wavre, a village which lies some 
thirteen miles from the field of Waterloo. 
To the officer who brought him this intelli- 
gence the Duke replied, that if he could hope 
to be supported even by a single Prussian 
corps he would wait for Napoleon at the Mont 
St. Jean and give him battle. Otherwise he 
would be compelled to sacrifice Brussels and 
to retreat beyond the Scheldt. A message 
which reached the British headquarters late 
on Saturday evening, clinched the case for an 
immediate battle. Bliicher's army was con- 
centrated at Wavre and the Duke might 
count on its assistance. Even allowing for 
muddy cross-roads, it was no extravagant 
calculation that somewhere about noon the 
Prussian guns could open upon the French 
right and begin to ease the strain upon the 
British position. 



234 NAPOLEON 

Wellington's then was the waiting, Napo- 
leon's the forcing game. The whole problem 
of British tactics was to defend the ridge of 
Mont St. Jean until the arrival of that single 
Prussian corps which Wellington expected, 
and had with his habitual exactitude of 
measurement asserted to be the indispensable 
condition of success. Yet in a battle where 
everything depended on the time-table, 
Napoleon waited until thirty-five minutes 
past eleven in the morning to begin the 
attack. The delay was explained partly by 
the late arrival of some of the French con- 
tingents, partly by the state of the ground, 
which was reported to be too sodden after 
the recent rains to admit of the easy move- 
ment of guns and cavalry. Still it can hardly 
be doubted that whatever weight might 
properly be attached to these considerations, 
Napoleon would not have scrupled to defy 
them had he surmised that 90,000 Prussians 
were collected within four hours' march and 
with the full intention of joining hands with 
Wellington during the course of the day. 
Though he had received a message from 
Grouchy at two a.m. that the mass of Prus- 
sians seemed to be marching on Wavre, 
nothing was further from his mind than the 
possibility that his operations would be seri- 
ously embarrassed by Blucher. He thought 
of the Prussian army as a broken and 
dispirited force, perhaps 40,000 strong, di- 
vided into two streams of fugitives, one of 
which was pouring eastwards towards Liege 



THE LAST PHASE 235 

and the other northwards towards Brussels. 
At ten a.m. he sent a message to Grouchy to 
attack the Prussians at Wavre, and even 
when at one o'clock he had ascertained that 
Biilow's corps was in sight, he was not se- 
riously alarmed. It was, he thought, but a 
single unsupported body, some 30,000 strong, 
which, if Grouchy moved rapidly from Gem- 
bloux, would be caught between two fires and 
annihilated. "This morning,' ' he said to 
Soult, "we had ninety odds in our favour. 
We have still sixty against forty." 

With that optimism which is the natural 
complement of courage and resource, but 
which is sometimes also the ally of a head- 
strong judgment, Napoleon took a low view 
of Wellington and his men. "I tell you," 
he said to Soult, who, having tasted English 
quality in the Spanish w T ars, regretted the 
detachment of so large a force under Grouchy, 
"that Wellington is a bad general and that 
his army is a bad army." Nor would he 
believe Reille, another Spanish veteran, who 
urged that the British infantry was im- 
pregnable to direct attack and only to be 
vanquished by manoeuvres. He determined 
to employ against the thin red line the shock 
tactics which had served him on so many a 
field and had recently been crowned with 
success at Ligny, to pierce the British centre 
by a grand frontal attack delivered after a 
shattering cannonade from his massed artil- 
lery. The operation was to be assisted by a 
diversion, not to be too severely pressed, upon 



236 NAPOLEON 

the farm of Hougoumont, which lay a little in 
advance of the British right. Sitting at a 
little table with his maps before him he 
anticipated that his sixtieth pitched battle 
would be a glorious day. 

In bare outline the battle of Waterloo takes 
the form of a series of tremendous charges 
delivered at the left and right centre of the 
British position supported by a concentrated 
fire from the guns, and repelled by the steadi- 
ness of the English and German troops. In 
the execution of these famous attacks there 
appear to have been two important faults 
from which Napoleon may with some proba- 
bility be absolved. The great charge of 
d'Erlon's division which opened the central 
attack at one o'clock was made in four col- 
umns each of so narrow a front and great 
a depth (seeing that the column was com- 
posed of eight battalions ranged one behind 
another), that while offering an admirable 
target to the British infantry, it possessed an 
altogether inadequate power of reply. It was, 
however, Napoleon's custom to leave the 
minor tactics to the discretion of his sub- 
ordinates; and the vicious formation of 
d'Erlon's charge may be classed as one of 
those mistakes for which the lieutenant is 
more properly responsible than his chief. 
The other error was even more serious, for it 
conditioned all subsequent stages of the fight. 
At 3.30 p.m., when the British infantry was 
still unshaken, Ney dashed across the valley, 
if the shallow depression between these two 



THE LAST PHASE 237 

ridges can so be called, at the head of an 
immense body of horse to attack it. Then 
began a long succession of furious cavalry 
charges, which spent themselves in vain 
against the solid valour of the British and 
German squares. That the first charge was 
premature and insufficiently supported is cer- 
tain, and those for whom Napoleon's word is as 
impeccable as his tactics, believe that it was 
undertaken without the Emperor's authority. 
The battle was won by the skill and courage 
of Wellington, by the imperturbable steadi- 
ness of his English and German troops, and 
finally by the advance of the Prussians who 
began to affect Napoleon's dispositions soon 
after four p.m., and in the last hour of day- 
light converted a repulse into a rout. With 
greater activity Grouchy might have delayed 
but could not have arrested the Prussian 
advance. Blucher could have contained him 
and yet had two divisions to spare for Wel- 
lington. If a handful of cavalry had beer/ 
told off to follow the retreat from Ligny 
instead of a whole division, or if the Old 
Guard had been sent in earlier and at full 
strength at Waterloo, would the result have 
been otherwise? It is possible, but we can 
never know. Perhaps Napoleon made mis- 
takes but his brain seems to have been as 
clear and active as ever, and though he ap- 
pears to have been unwell on the morning of 
the 17th, his physical achievement during 
the campaign would, in any other man, have 
been deemed extraordinary. On Waterloo 



238 NAPOLEON 

Sunday he rose at one a.m., went the round 
of his outposts, returned at three a.m., 
listened to the reports of his scouts and spies, 
dictated fresh orders, and at nine, a.m. rode 
out to the battle-field. There he remained 
till nightfall, attending to the course of oper- 
ations and issuing orders efficiently, directly, 
ceaselessly. When the army was broken 
beyond repair he tried vainly to rally the 
fugitives, and rode onwards till he reached 
Charleville at five o'clock on the following 
morning. In the four critical days of the 
campaign he had hardly taken twenty hours' 
rest, and had spent more than thirty-seven 
hours in the saddle. 

It is also characteristic of his indomitable 
spirit that even after Waterloo he continued 
to battle against fate. From Philippevilie he 
wrote to his brother Joseph, arguing that 
300,000 men could still be gathered, and that 
with constancy and courage all might- yet be 
saved. In the bulletin which he composed 
for the Moniteur on June 19 he painted the 
disaster as the result of an inexplicable panic 
supervening in the moment of victory. When 
he arrived in Paris on June 21 his first thought 
was of a dictatorship to be conferred by the 
Chambers for the salvation of the country; 
but he was no longer the man of Brumaire, 
and when both houses firmly demanded his 
immediate abdication, he was too broken to 
resist. The deed was signed on June 22. A 
few days longer he remained in Paris, balanc- 
ing in his mind as the ragged mob cheered hira 



THE LAST PHASE 239 

at the Elysee, whether he would not appeal 
to the Jacobin spirit and stir the furies of a 
civil war. But the deep Imperial instinct, 
which made him contemptuous of the canaille, 
saved him from so dishonourable a close, 
and in his retreat at Malmaison his thoughts 
began to turn to a new life in America dedi- 
cated to literary work. On June 25 he wrote 
a farewell address to the French army, strik- 
ing in his clear and ringing prose notes of high 
confidence and manly pathos which belong 
to the sublime pages of literature. Then, 
four days later, as Bliicher's Prussians were 
reported in the neighbourhood he made his 
way towards the sea. The Provisional Govern- 
ment had abruptly refused his offer to serve 
France as a general under their command. 

Finding at last that the land was unsafe 
and the sea beset by English cruisers, he made 
a virtue of necessity, and in his old bravura 
manner wrote a letter to the Prince Regent 
of England announcing that "he came like 
Themistocles to seat himself at the hearth of 
the British people," and to claim the protec- 
tion of their laws. The reader of historical 
memoirs may regret that a career so variously 
and brilliantly tinted should not have found 
a diverting close among the solid squires of 
England or in the robust and equally un- 
familiar air of the American Republic. But 
having a general duty to the peace of Europe 
as well as a special obligation to the Allies, 
the British Government was compelled to see 
that Napoleon should never again fill the 



240 NAPOLEON 

world with the roar of his cannon. He was 
sent to a storm-swept rock in the far Atlantic, 
and there on May 5, 1821 — 

" Seen like some rare treasure galleon 
Hull down with masts against the Western hues," 

after a long and painful illness bravely borne, 
finally expiated that deep offence of which we 
must seek the original root in the quarrel 
between the French Revolution and the 
ancient society of Europe. Three months 
older than Wellington, he was at the time 
of his death in his fifty-second year. 

Everybody must wish that he had fallen at 
Waterloo, charging at the head of his Old 
Guard, as the dusk of evening stole across the 
summer sky. Yet the St. Helena captivity, 
while it exhibits the violent and paltry side 
of a blended character, is barren neither of 
historical significance nor of intellectual gran- 
deur. The career of Napoleon was not closed 
when he stepped on board the Bellerophon, 
not even when he landed on the quay of 
Jamestown. He had still a policy to pursue 
and a part to play . ' ' The battle of Waterloo, ' ' 
he said, "will be as dangerous to the liberties 
of Europe as the battle of Philippi was dan- 
gerous to the liberties of Rome"; and in the 
dark reaction which he rightly anticipated as 
likely to follow from the triumph of the 
monarchs he descried a gleam of hope for 
the little boy whom he had proudly entitled 
the King of Rome. Some day France would 
rise against a dynasty, imposed on her by 



THE LAST PHASE 241 

foreign armies and favouring an obsolete 
society and an outworn creed; and when 
that epoch of liberal upheaval came, French- 
men would remember the Empire, a govern- 
ment popular in origin, modern in character, 
and surrounded by an aureole of incompar- 
able glory. So in his conversations and me- 
moirs he developed those elements of his life 
and policy, which seemed likely to commend 
themselves to a liberal age, dictating accounts 
of the early campaigns in Italy, Egypt and 
Syria, when he laid the foundations of his 
renown in the service of a republic, and 
representing himself in talk as the constant 
friend of peace, freedom and national rights. 
Such was his political legacy, subtly com- 
pounded of truth and falsehood, but conceived 
in the spirit of a coming age. Living upon 
its wealth, the nephew of Napoleon rose upon 
the forty-sixth anniversary of Austerlitz to 
be Emperor of the French, and afterwards to 
be one of the makers of United Italy. 

"I am a fragment of rock launched into 
space." In this image of a meteor flashing 
from the unknown Napoleon depicts his 
irresponsible flight through history. As he 
turned an admiring gaze upon his extraordi- 
nary career he thought of himself not as a 
creature treading the narrow pathway of 
human convention, but as some elemental 
force of Nature without love or hate let loose 
upon the world and ruled by the law of its 
own inner necessity. Small men strung their 
lives on a steady thread of principle, waited 



U% NAPOLEON 

on second-hand theories and respected the 
moral prudence of the race. They were 
"idealogues," trammelled by the scruples 
of an intellectual caste. Great men acted 
like a flash of lightning. It was a part of 
their greatness to move onwards with an 
easy confidence, to be exempt from the 
common pain and labour of decision, and even 
in the gravest determinations to be uncon- 
scious of the exercise of will. "In the strong 
man everything is at one and the same time 
reason and movement. He wills with im- 
petuosity what he has conceived with deep 
reflection and his heroism is all of a single 
piece." Napoleon's career was marvellous, 
but it is even more wonderful that he often 
thought of it as inevitable, as the automatic 
response of the clear head and true judg- 
ment to the shifting stress and strain of 
circumstance. 

The diamonds which were found sewn into 
a coat in his carriage after Waterloo are 
typical of the spirit in which he carried on 
his great adventure, for even in his hours of 
established authority and splendour he was 
uneasily aware that he was skirting the edge 
of ruin. Every one is familiar with the story 
of how even as Emperor he would steal out 
of his palace in disguise at cockcrow to chatter 
with workmen and shopkeepers and so feel 
the pulse of the town. Power never brought 
false security or lulled the quick sense of peril 
which comes with a life spent among elemen- 
tal things. To the end he was the corsair, 



THE LAST PHASE 243 

watchful against his enemies and scenting the 
faintest breath of treachery in the wind. 

Books have been filled with the record of 
his kindly actions and gracious words, for 
where ambition did not conflict, he could be 
full of amiability and pleasant helpfulness. 
He shed blood freely but never wantonly, 
using as much severity as the occasion seemed 
to demand, but keeping his standard of 
severity high. As a young general he con- 
sented, though with visible reluctance, to 
the shooting of 2500 Turkish prisoners who 
had surrendered to his officers under pledge 
that their lives would be spared, a course 
which has been defended even in modern 
times by a barbarous casuistry, on the ground 
that the prisoners could neither be trusted 
if released, nor fed if retained. Later on the 
practice of war made him callous to slaugh- 
ter, and after surveying the hideous carnage 
of Borodino he wrote that it was "the finest 
battlefield" which he had yet seen. 1 Very 
different was Wellington's comment on the 
soldier's life. "I hope to God," he said to 
Lady Shelley just after Waterloo, "that I 
have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing 
to be always fighting. While in the thick of 
it I am too much occupied to feel anything; 
but it is wretched just after. It is quite im- 
possible to think of glory. Both mind and 
feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even 

1 " C'est le champ de bataille le plus beau que j'ai encore 
mi." From a letter in the possession of Lord Crawford 
which I have generously been allowed to read and to quote. 



244 NAPOLEON 

in the moment of victory, and I always say 
that next to a battle lost the greatest misery 
is a battle gained." 

Though he made some devoted friends and 
retained to a wonderful degree the capacity 
for frank and good-humoured intercourse 
with all sorts and conditions of men, Napo- 
leon was never to be depended on for taste, 
truth or charity. Nor can he be held up as a 
pattern of the domestic virtues. The cata- 
logue of his amours which were pursued 
sometimes without decorum, generally with- 
out sentiment, yet never to the detriment of 
business, is sufficient to show that he was 
neither above nor below the current standards 
of his time and calling. Yet if he was no 
purist in morality, he was no slave of the 
senses; and since the days of St. Louis 
French policy has never been held so high 
above the corrupting taint of favouritism and 
intrigue. In a world of struggle and greedy 
parvenus, stoical ambition, severe and inex- 
orable, stood at the wheel of affairs. 

His heart thrilled to the appeal of great 
open spaces, to the mysterious sound of the 
sea, to the serene charm of pure starlit skies. 
The little unobtrusive beauties of Nature, the 
poise or tint of a flower, the song of a bird, 
the winter tracery of a tree were unnoticed, 
and, if noticed, would have been dismissed 
like the plays of Racine, as elegancies fit only 
for young people. It was essential to his idea 
of beauty that it should have grandeur, and 
to his notion of grandeur that it should exalt 



THE LAST PHASE 245 

the character and steel the will to high 
resolves. The free play of thought, the wit, 
the gaiety, the elastic spirit of invention, the 
love of beauty for beauty's sake — all these 
essential ingredients in the life and progress 
of art did not affect him. "Ah, good taste, 
there is one of your classical phrases which I 
do not adopt. What is called style, good or 
bad, hardly strikes me. I am only sensible 
to the power of thought." So his criteria in 
literature and art were those not of the aes- 
thete but of the practical man, who judges a 
novel by its plot and characters, a picture by 
its moral rather than its technique. "A bad 
subject," he remarked of David's Thermopylae; 
"after all Leonidas was turned." Why 
should a painter go out of his way to immor- 
talise the defeat of an indifferent general? 
It was the province of art and literature to 
reward merit and decorate success. 

Nevertheless it would be untrue to say 
either that the grand things in literature 
meant nothing to Napoleon, or that he was 
incapable of himself producing literature of 
value. The man who remarked to the Theo- 
philanthropists, a somewhat absurd and 
pedantic sect: "Do you want sublimity? 
Well, then, read the Lord's Prayer," was 
clearly alive to the appeal of grave and simple 
beauty. Some of his own bulletins, written 
just after the excitement of battle, are splen- 
did specimens of crisp and nervous French, 
softened here and there with a deft touch of 
poetic imagination, or ennobled by a burst 



246 NAPOLEON 

of real eloquence. Refined critics, to whose 
tribunal he did not appeal, have often caught 
a false ring in the rhetoric, and condemned 
the melodrama as cheap and tawdry; but it 
must be remembered that in his bulletins 
and proclamations Napoleon was not address- 
ing the burgess in the black coat, but the 
soldiers and the people of France. "The 
men who have changed the universe," he 
observed, "have never succeeded by captur- 
ing the leaders, but always by moving the 
masses"; and the Napoleonic writings were 
addressed to the masses. Never was so bril- 
liant a fugue upon the twin themes of patri- 
otism and glory addressed to the multitude of 
any country. Like the philosophy of Rous- 
seau which it temporarily displaced, the 
literature of Napoleon belongs to the library 
of the demagogue. He was the prince of 
journalists, the father of war correspondents, 
and in the art of engineering political opinion 
through the machinery of the Press he, the 
tyrannical censor of newspapers, is the pio- 
neer of those great newspaper trusts which 
now impress their violent unwisdom on a 
suffering age. 

Talleyrand, a severe critic since he had 
injuries to avenge, said that Napoleon's judg- 
ment, when unhurried, was excellent, and that 
in a life crowded with incident he was guilty 
of only three serious blunders in political 
prudence — Spain, the Pope and Russia. If 
the scrutiny of modern historians prolongs 
the list of errors, it cannot refuse admiration 



THE LAST PHASE 247 

to the tact for circumstance which in peace 
and war solved so many problems, van- 
quished so many dangers, and again and 
again turned defeat into victory. Still the 
question remains and may be debated with an 
infinite variety of qualifying phrases, how far 
the ultimate end of Napoleon's activity was 
consistent with true nobility of character. 
Conquest for conquest's sake is the ideal of a 
savage. Before conquest or empire can be 
justified, the end for which wars are fought 
and empires are won must be established in 
the court of moral pleas. In ultimate analy- 
sis what dream can well be more vulgar and 
barbarous than the conquest of the world 
by the sword? Apart from the bloodshed, 
misery and desolation immediately involved 
in the process, what good or valuable result 
can be obtained from the general abasement 
of national self-respect, or the violent destruc- 
tion of national individuality? Napoleon 
did not argue the question. He took glory 
as his end, found it in conquest, and was too 
often prone to measure it by destruction. So 
with the grandest intellectual endowments 
ever vouchsafed to man, and despite many 
splendid services to law, to administration, 
to the moral and intellectual progress of 
France, he remains the great modern example 
of that reckless and defiant insolence which 
formed the matter of ancient tragedy and is 
at war with the harmonies of human life. 

December, 1912. 



APPENDIX I 

SOME MAXIMS OF NAPOLEON 

■"" Power is never ridiculous. 

■*" Love of country is the first virtue of civilised man. 

The true wisdom of nations is experience. 

High tragedy is the school of great men. It is the duty of 
sovereigns to encourage and spread it. Tragedy warms the 
soul, raises the heart, can and ought to create heroes. 

Men are like figures, which only acquire value in virtue of 
their position. 
*— The heart of a statesman should be in his head. 

— Be clear and all the rest will follow. 

The vice of our modern institutions is that they have 
nothing which appeals to the imagination. Man can only be 
governed through imagination. Without it he is a brute. 

Extracts! A pitiable method! Young people have time 
to read long books and the imagination to seize all the great 
things. 

History paints the human heart. 

Love is the occupation of the idle man, the distraction of 
the warrior, the stumbling block of the sovereign. 

Conscription is the eternal root of a nation, purifying its 
morality and framing all its habits. 

Education and history, these are the great enemies of true 
religion. 

I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation but 
the mystery of the social order. It attaches to heaven an 
idea of equality which prevents the rich man] from being 
massacred by the poor. 

— Unity of command is the first necessity of war. 

I regard myself as probably the most daring man in war 
who has ever existed. 
- . The first quality of a commander-in-chief is a cool head. 

I have always loved analysis, and were I to fall seriously 
in love I would dissect my love piece by piece. Why and 
How are useful questions one cannot too frequently ask 
oneself. 

Heart! How the devil do you know what your heart 
is? It is a bit of you crossed by a big vein in which the blood 
goes quicker when you run. 

The virtue and magic of an aristocracy consist in time and 
antiquity, the only things which I was unable to create, 



APPENDIX I 249 

A general who does great things must possess civil quali- 
ties. It is because he is reputed to be the best brain that the 
soldier obeys and respects him. 
** All the ills and curses which can afflict mankind come from 
London. 

A great captain ought to say to himself several times a 
day: If the enemy appear on my front, my right or my left, 
what should I do? If he finds himself embarrassed, he is ill 
posted. 

England would have finally been no more than an appendix 
to my France. Nature has designed her to be a French island 
like Oleron or Corsica. 

A constitution without an aristocracy is a ball lost in the 
air. 

Aristocracy always exists. Destroy it in the nobility, it 
removes itself immediately to the rich and powerful houses 
of the middle class. Destroy it in these, it survives and takes 
refuge with the leaders of the workshops and the people. 

Work is my element. I am born and built for work. I 
have known the limits of my legs. I have known the limits 
of my eyes. I have never known the limits of my work. 

I had the taste for foundation, not the taste for property. 
My property consisted in glory and celebrity. 

There are only two nations, East and West. France, 
England, Spain, have very much the same morals, the same 
religion, the same ideas. 

He lies too much. One may very well lie sometimes, but 
always, is too much. 

Bleeding enters into the combinations of political medicine. 

I had long meditated the project of forming in France 
iwenty or twenty-five military districts, each with its own 
army. 
*— Love ! I don't quite know what that means in politics. 

Your letter is too clever. Cleverness is not wanted in war. 
What is wanted is accuracy, character and simplicity. 

Religion is an important affair in a public institution for 
the education of young ladies. Let them be brought up to 
believe and not to reason. 

I regard savants and intellectuals as coquettes. See them 
and talk to them, but do not marry the one or make a minister 
of the other. 
*~ In government, never retrace your steps. 

There are men fit to translate a poem who are incapable 
of leading fifteen men. 

There is a complaint that we have no literature; it is the 
iault of the Minister of the Interior. 

When a king is said to be a kind man, the reign is a failure. 



APPENDIX 



Francois Clary 



CARLO MARIA BONAPARTE - 
6. 1746. d. 1785. I 



Desir^e 
«= Marshal 
Bernadotte 

(Charles 
XIV, King 
of Sweden) . 



Julie = 



Zenaide 
2nd son of 
Lucien. 



Joseph, King 
of Naples; 
d. 1844. 



Napoleon 1= (1) Josephine Tascher de * 
d. 1821. laPagerie; d. 1814. 

(2) Marie Louise of 
Austria. 



Charlotte 

= 2nd son of 

Louis. 



Napoleon, 

King ot Rome, 

Duke of Reichstadt; 

d. 1832. 



Charles, Paul; Lucien; 

Prince of Canino; d. 1827. d. 1891. 

d. 1859. 



Joseph; 
d. 1865. 



Lucien, 

Cardinal 

Bonaparte; 

d. 1895. 



Napoleon Charles 



Eugenie 
<= great-grandson 
of Marshal Ney. 



' Josephine's first marriage 

Josephine = Vict. Alex de Beauhamais. 



r 



Eugene = Augusta of Bavaria. 
King of Italy, 

Duke of 
Leuchtenberg; 

d. 1824. 



Augustus; Maximilian; 

d. 1835 d. 1852. 

= Maria, Queen 
of Portugal. 



Josephine = Oscar I of Sweden. 



250 



II. 

MARIE LETIZIA RAMOLINO; 
6. 1750. d. 1836. 



Lucien , 
Prince of 

Canino; 

d. 1840; 
(l)Chr. Boyer. 
(2) Alexandrine 
Jouberthon. 



Elise; 

d. 1820, 

= Felix 

Bacciochi, 

Duke of 

Lucca. 



Louis, 

King of 

Holland; 

d. 1846; 

= Hortense 

Beauharnais. 



Pauline Caroline; 

= (1) General d. 1839 

Leclerc. =Joachim 

(2) Camillo Murat, 

Borghese; King of 

d. 1825. Naples. 



Achille 
Murat. 



Napoleon 
Charles; 
d. 1807. 



Napoleon 
Louis; 
d. 1831 



leon Ch. Lc 



Pierre; 
d. 1881. 



Roland 



Ch. JLouis 

Napoleon 
(Napoleon III) ; 

d. 1873; 
= Eugenie Maria. 



Lucien 
Murat. 



Lucien 
d. 1878. 



Napoleon Louis 

(Prince Imperial) ; 

d. 1879. 



Marie = Prince George of Greece. 



Jerome, 

King of Westphalia; 

d. 1860; 

= (1) Elizabeth Paterson. 

(2) Catharine of Wurtemberg. 



Jerome Napoleon; 
d. 1870. 



Mathilde Napoleon Joseph Charles; 
=P. Anatole d. 1891. 

Demidoff . = Clothilda of Savoy. 



Victor Napoleon. Napoleon Louis, 

General in Russian Army. 



Letizia, 

= Duke of Aosta, 

King of Spain 

1870-73. 



251 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The reader is primarily recommended to Fournier's Napo- 
leon I, 2 vols. (A. Adams), an Austrian work of high authority 
and furnished with an exhaustive bibliography chapter by 
chapter. Among other lives, accessible to those who do not 
read French, those by J. R. Seeley (1 vol.) and J. H. Rose 
(2 vols.) may be singled out, the first for its acute and inter- 
esting reflections, the second for its maps, descriptions of 
campaigns and treatment of British diplomacy. R. M. 
Johnston's The Corsican is an interesting attempt to tell 
Napoleon's life in his own words. The French histories of 
Lanfrey (unfavourable) and Taine are accessible in English 
translations. The latter is specially important for Napoleon's 
domestic statesmanship. 

Other works written in or translated into English may be 
profitably consulted for special aspects or periods of Napo- 
leon's activity: — The Cambridge Modern History, vols, viii and 
ix; O. Browning, Napoleon, the First Phase; York von War- 
temburg, Napoleon as a General; Oman, Peninsular War; 
F. Loraine Petre, Napoleon's Campaign in Poland, Napoleon s 
Conquest of Prussia, Napoleon and the Archduke Charles; 
Dunn-Pattison, Napoleons Marshals; Rose, Napoleonic 
Studies; George, Napoleon s Campaign in Russia; Ropes, 
The Waterloo Campaign; Houssaye, 1815; Seaton, Napoleon 
and Sir Hudson Lowe; Rosebery, Napoleon, the Last Phase 
(containing a brilliant study of Napoleon's temperament). 
Of English contemporary memoirs, perhaps the most illumi- 
nating is Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences. 

Students who are acquainted with French have a far wider 
choice. They may start by reading Napoleon's early works 
in Masson, Napoleon Inconnu, and then dive into his Cor- 
respondence (of which thirty-two volumes in the official col- 
lection, two volumes [containing the letters less favourable to 
Napoleon's character] ed. L. Lecestre, one volume ed. L. 
Brotonne) . Pelet de la Lozere, Opinions de NapoUon, Marco 
de St. Hilaire, NapoUon du Conseil d'Etat, Damas-Hinard, 
Napoleon, Opinions et Jugements, are also illuminating. 

In the great literature of memoirs, the *Duchesse d'Abran- 
tes, *Mme. de Remusat, *Bourrienne, Chaptal, Villemain, 
*Gourgaud, are specially instructive for the private life; 
*Miot de Melito, Roederer, Mollien, Thibaudeau, for civil 
activity; Marmont, *Marbot, *Rapp, *Thiebaul't, Fesenzac, 

25£ 



INDEX 



253 



*S6gur, *Coignet, *Bourgogne for campaigning. Perhaps the 
best contemporary estimates of character are to be found in 
*Mme. de Stael, Metternich and Chaptal. 

The two most considerable modern apologists are Levy, 
whose Napoleon Intime and NapolSon et la Paix are grounded 
on accurate knowledge, and F. Masson, whose NapoUon et 
sa Famille is only one of a long series of valuable monographs 
on the personal life. 

The following modern treatises, specially those marked with 
an asterisk, may be recommended — 

Marcaggi, La Genese de Napoleon; Chuquet, La Jeunesse 
de Napoleon; Bouvier, Napoleon en Italie; Driault, Napoleon 
I et I Italie; * Vandal, L'Avenement de Bonaparte; Rambaud, 
La domination frangaise en Allemagne; Madelin, Le Premier 
Consul legislateur; Colin, U Education Militaire de Napolion; 
Morvan, Le Soldat Imperial; *Vandal, Napoleon et Alexandre; 
Driault, La Politique Orientale de Napoleon; *Houssaye, 
1811^, 1815; Gonnard, Les Origines de le Legende Napoleon- 
nienne; *Sorel, L' Europe et la Revolution Frangaise. 

General Literature: — Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts; George 
Meredith, Odes Contributory to the Song of French History 
(the Ode of Napoleon is truer than most histories); Victor 
Hugo, A la Colonne; Anatole France, Clio (La Muiron). 

(* Those marked with an asterisk have been translated.) 



INDEX 



Aboukir Bay, 64, 68-9 
Acre, 67 

Aix-la-Chapelle, 133 
Alexander I., Emp. of Russia, 108, 
135, 139, 141, 150-3, 179-80, 
194-5 
Alvintzi, 43-6 
Augereau, 36, 46. 55 
Austria: 

Humiliations endured by, 133 

Interests of (1795), 30-1 

Napoleon's campaign against 

(1796), 38-49; peace proposals 

(1799), 99; renewed hostilities 

(1800), 100-6; (1805), 137-41; 

(1808-9), 181-8; (1813), 203-4 

Russian alliance with (1805), 136, 

139 
Venice acquired by, 49-51; lost, 
141 

Battles and fights: 
Aboukir, 68-9 
Aboukir Bay, 64 



Arcis-sur-Aube, 215-16 

Areola, 45-6 

Auerstadt, 147 

Austerlitz, 139-41 

Bassano, 41 

Bautzen, 202 

Baylen, 177 

Borodino, 190, 200, 243 and ft. 

Castiglione, 41 

Dennewitz, 206 

Dresden, 206-7 

Friedland, 150 

Gross Beeren, 206 

Hohenlinden, 105 

Jena, 147 

Kulm, 208 

La Rothi^re, 214 

Leipzig, 190. 209-11 

Ligny, 229-31 

Lobau, 185 

Lutzen, 202 

Marengo, 103-5 

Montereau, 215 

Prujsisch-Eylau, 14& 



254 



INDEX 



Battles and fights (continued): 

Quatre Bras, 227, 230-2 

Ratisbon, 184 

Rivoli, 47 

Toulon, 23 

Trafalgar, 144 

Vimiero, 178 

Wagram, 186 

Waterloo, 226, 236-8 
Bavaria, 142, 212 
Beauharnais, Eugene, 134, 142 

, Josephine, 27-8, 54, 121, 188 

Belgium, 22, 29, 30, 56, 224 

Berlin decrees, 148 

Bernadotte, 140, 208-9, 211 

Berthier, 36, 61, 182 

Bliicher, 206, 208-11, 214, 215, 224, 

227, 229, 233, 237 
Bonaparte, Elise, 135 

, Jerome, 122, 152 

, Joseph, 13, 17, 20, 122, 134, 

144, 146, 176 

, Louis, 122, 134, 176 

, Lucien, 19, 21, 77-8, 122, 166 

, Napoleon, see Napoleon 

, Pauline, 114 

■ family, 9, 165-6; genealogical 

table of, 250 
Bourbons, 55, 125, 220 

Cadoudal, 92-3 

Carnot, 28, 222 

Charlemagne parallel, 165, 220 

Charles, Archduke, 49, 133, 139, 

181-4, 186 
Charles IV, King of Spain, 171, 

173-6 
Corsica, 10-11, 17-18 
Corsicans, 11-12 

d'Artois, Comte, 220-1 
Davidovitch, 41, 44-6- 
Davout, 147, 182-4 
d'Enghien, Due, 93-4 
d'Erlori, 230-1, 236 
Desaix, 71, 103-5 

Egyptian campaign — project of, 
58-60; course of, 61-70; results 
of, 71-2; French evacuation, 109; 
designs for recovery, 116 

Elba, 217 

England, see Great Britain 

European situation (1796), 29 ff. 
(1799), 98; (1801), 106-7; (1802) 
109; (1305), 133; (1808), 180 
(1813), 204, 212; (1816), 226 
League of Neutrals, 107-8,111 
blockade against Great Britain, 
144, 152, 191-S, 195-6; Napo- 
leon's outlook, 112 

Federation, 160 



Ferdinand of Spain, 174-6 
France: 

Armies of, in 1796, 29, 35-6; 
atheism of, 64; deterioration 
of, 186; in Russian expedition, 
198-9; Napoleon's, return wel- 
comed by, 218; at Waterloo, 224 

Centralised government of, 83 

Civil Code, 84, 94-7 

Concordat, 89-90 

Consulate, 78 ff. 

Convention, 25-7 

Directory, 60; Napoleon's rela- 
tions with, 43, 54-5; discredit 
and downfall of, 73-8 

Empire of, 161 ff. 

English royal title to, 109 

Jacobin intrigues, 90 

Legion of Honour, 84 

Navy of, 57, 130 

Revolution, the: 

Church policy of, 86-7 
Civil Code in relation to, 97 
Crisis of 1793, 22 
Insurrection of 1795, 25 
Land settlement of, 85-6 
Napoleon's attitude to, 20 

Rhine frontier of, 99-101 

Royalist intrigues, 90-2, 119 
. Social privilege abolished, 84-5; 
Napoleonic nobility, 156-7 

University of, 157-8 

Vendee rebellions, 73, 91, 224 
Francis, Emp. of Austria, 180, 187-8 
Frotte, 91 

Germany: 

Confederation of the Rhine, 143-4 

Napoleon's view of, 112 

Rise of, against Napoleon, 212 
Great Britain: 

Colonies of, surrendered, 109—10 

Corn supplies of, 192-3 

Empire of, 161 

European blockade against, 144, 
152, 191-3, 195-6; Berlin de- 
crees, 148 

Hostility of, to French Revolu 
tionary Government, 56-7 

Napoleon's attitude towards, 57— 
8; his breach with, 118; his 
projected invasion of, 126, 128- 
32; his overtures to, 223, 239 

Peninsular War, 177, 187, 193-4, 
212 

Royal title to France, 109 

Russian alliance with (1799), 98 

Walcheren expedition, 187 
Grouchy, 228, 232, 234-5, 237 

Hanover, 145 
Holland, 159, 212 



INDEX 



255 



Holy Roman Empire, abolition of, 
143 

India, Napoleon's designs on, 58-9, 
70-1, 116, 197 

Italian campaign (1796), 38-49 

kingdom, 134, 142 

republic (1796), 42, 51-3; re- 
stored, 105-6, 109, 133; made a 
kingdom, 134 

Italy, Napoleon's services to, 142 

Junot, 173, 178 

Kleber, 61, 70 
Kutusoff, 140, 200 

Leclerc, 114 

Louis XVIII, King of France, 217; 
government of, 219-20 

Malta: 

British undertaking as to (1802), 
109, 115; violated, 116 

Napoleon's success at (1798), 62 
Mantua, siege of, 39-47 
Maps, 37, 183, 225 
Marie Louise, 189 
Massena, 47, 99-102, 156, 184-5, 193 
Mediterranean schemes, 59 
Melas, 100-5 

Metternich, 181; quoted, 203-4 
Military art: 

Advancement of, 31-3 

Napoleon's view of, 13, 14 
Moreau, 75, 92, 100-2, 105, 114, 121 
Murat, 175-6, 209, 224 

Naples, 107, 109, 133, 145, 146 

Napoleon Bonaparte: 

Appearance of, 7-8, 27, 28 
Career — youth, 12 ff.; Corsican 
revolution, 17-19; flight from 
Corsica, 21; success at Toulon, 
23; difficulties with the Con- 
vention, 23, 25; saves the Con- 
vention, 26-7; marriage, 28; 
Italian command, 36; the cam- 
paign, 38-49; the treaty, 49- 
60, 55-6; Egyptian campaign, 
61-70; Syrian campaign, 66-8; 
return to France, 73; over- 
throw of Directory, 74-8; the 
Consulate, 78; plots and risings, 
90-2; murder of Due d'Eng- 
hien, 93-4; the Civil Code, 
96-7; peace proposals, 99; 
Austrian campaign (1800), 
101-5; aggressive activities, 
109, 115-10; life Consul, 119; 



breach with England, 118; 
Emperor, 121; King of Lom- 
bardy, 134-5; defeat of Aus- 
trians, 137-41; German trea- 
ties, 143; defeat of Prussia, 
146-8; Berlin decrees, 148; in 
Warsaw, 149; Russian alliance, 
150-3; excommunicated, 169; 
conquest of Spain and Portu- 
gal, 171 ff.; conference with 
Alexander, 179; hostilities 
with Austria, 180-8; divorce 
and marriage with Marie 
Louise, 188-9; Russian expedi- 
tion, 197-201; Prussian cam- 
paign (1813), 202 ff.; campaign 
of the Seine and Marne, 214- 
16; abdication, 217; at Elba, 
217-18; return to France, 218- 
19; Waterloo campaign, 225 ff.; 
second abdication, 238; banish- 
ment and death, 240 

Characteristics of, 12-14, 16, 54; 
activity, 16, 181; breadth of 
view and shrewd judgment, 
39, 48, 49; administrative effi- 
ciency, 81-3; self-confidence, 
82; intolerance and irritability, 
117, 191; pride, 117, 212-13; 
masterfulness, 124-5; lucidity 
of mind, 144 

Court of, 123-4 

Dispatches of, 82-3, 246 

Eastern ambitions of, 58-60, 111 

Economic ideas of, 111 

Economies of, 166-8 

Educational deficiencies of, 82 

Estimate of, 242-7; his own 
estimate, 241-2; Talleyrand's, 
246; posterity's, 7-9 

Family relations of, 125 

French attitude towards, 73-4, 
119-21, 212, 218, 22-2 

Government as conceived by, 74, 
80, 83, 124 

Imperial policy of, 155 ff., 191 

Maxims of, 248-9 

Memoirs of, 241 

Military methods of, 34-5; 
achievements other than vic- 
tories, 102, 190, 201 

Religious policy of, 63-4, 81, 86 
ff., 163-i, 170 

Scientific preoccupations of, 
61-2,75 

Succession question, 122 

Woman, attitude towards, 97 
Napoleon, King of Rome, 189, 240 

Ill, 241 

National spirit, 176-7, 190-1 
Nelson, 62, 64, 108, 130 
Ney, 205, 228-32 and n., 236 



%56 



INDEX 



Paoli, Pasquaie, 10, 11, 18-21 ? 

Papal government, Napoleon's re- 
lations with <1797), 48; (1802, 
the Concordat), 89; (1805), 142; 
(1809), 169-70 

Paul I, Emperor of Russia 106-7 

Pichegru, 55, 92 

Poland, 29, 194-5 

Portugal, 107-9; the Peninsular 
War, 170-3, 176, 178, 193-4 

Prussia: 

Hanoverian embroilment, 145^ 
Napoleon's hostilities against 
(1806), 146-8; (1813), 202 ff.; 
Leipzig, 209-11 
Neutrality of (1795), 29 
Russian alliance (1805), 138 

Ramolino, Marie-Letizia, 9-10, 21, 

54 
Roman Empire parallel, 162-3 
Russia: 

Austrian alliance with (1805), 

136 139 
British alliance with (1799), 98 
Inactivity of (1795), 29 
Napoleon's understanding with 
(1801), 106-7; alliance (1807), 
150-3, 179-80, 194; expedition 
against (1812), 197-201 
Prussian alliance with (1805), 138 

St. Helena, 240 

San Domingo expedition, 109-10, 

112—14 154 
Schwarzenberg, 206-10, 214 
Sieyes, Abbe, 75, 78 
Smith, Sir Sidney, 67, 69 
Soult, 140, 212, 235 
Souper de Beaitcaire, 22 
Spain: 

Napoleon's relations with, 107-9, 
133, 144-5; his acquisition of, 
171 ff. 

Nationality of, 176-7 



Wellesley's operations in, 178, 
187, 212 
Strategy, evolution of, 33 
Sweden, 149-50 
Switzerland: 

French invasion of (1798), 61 
Napoleon's relations with, 111 9 
112 
Syrian campaign, 66-8 

Talleyrand, 116, 123, 191, 217j 

cited, 246 
Toulon, 22-3 

Amiens, Peace of (1802), 108-lOj 

breach of, 116 
Basle, 138 

Campo-Formio (1797), 55-« 
Confederation of the Rhine 

(1806), 143-4 
German States, with, 143 
Luneville (1801), 106; breach o£, 

135 
Persia, with, 150 
Presburg (1805), 141, 145 
Russo-Austrian (1804), 135 
Schonbrunn (1805), 141 
Tilsit, Peace of (1807), 150 
Tolentino (1797), 48 
Vienna (1809), 188, 195 
Turkey: 

French war with (1799), 66-9 
Napoleon's designs on, 115, 152. 

179; his advice to, 150 

Ulm, capitulation of, 137 

Venice, 49-51, 141 

Walewska, Countess, 149 
Waterloo campaign, 225 ff. 
Wellington in Peninsular War, 178, 
187, 194, 212; the Waterloo cam- 
paign, 225, 227, 230, 232n., 233-4, 
237, 243; Napoleon's estimate of, 
235 



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PRESENT DAY. By Ernest Barker, M. A. 

79. UNEMPLOYMENT. By A. C. Pigou, M. A., Professor of Political 
Economy at Cambridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution, 
and effects of unemployment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations, 
and disputes, and some proposals of remedy or relief. 



4. A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE. By G. H. Perris, 

author of "Russia in Revolution," etc. 

94. THE NAVY AND SEA POWER. By David Hannay, author of "Short 
History of the Royal Navy," etc. A brief history of the navies, sea 
Power, and ship growth of all nations, including the rise and decline 
of America on the sea, and explaining the present British supremacy. 

8. POLAR EXPLORATION. By Dr. W. S. Bruce, Leader of the 
"Scotia" expedition. Emphasizes the results of the expeditions. 

~ 51. MASTER MARINERS. By John R. Spears, author of "The His- 
tory of Our Navy," etc. A history of sea craft adventure from the 
earliest times. 

86. EXPLORATION OF THE ALPS. By Arnold Lunn, M. A. 

7. MODERN GEOGRAPHY. By Dr. Marion Newbigin. Shows the re- 
lation of physical features to living things and to some of the chief in- 
stitutions of civilization. 

76. THE OCEAN. A GENERAL ACCOUNT OF THE SCIENCE OF 
THE SEA. By Sir John Murray* K. C. B., Naturalist H. M. S. "Chal- 
lenger," 1872-1876, joint author of "The Depths of the Ocean," etc. 

84. THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Granville Cole, Professor of 
Geology, Royal College of Science, Ireland. A study of the geology 
and physical geography in connection with the political geography. 

AMERICAN HISTORY. 



47. THE COLONIAL PERIpD (1607-1766). By Charles McLean An- 
drews, Professor of American History, Yale. 

82. THE WARS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA (1763-1815). 
By Theodore C. Smith, Professor of American History, Williams 
College. A history of the period, with especial emphasis on The Re- 
volution and The War of 1812. 

67. FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN (1815-1860). By William Mac- 
Donald. Professor of History, Brown University. The author makes 
the history of this period circulate about constitutional ideas and slavery 
sentiment. 

25. THE CIVIL WAR (1854-1865). By Frederick L. Paxson, Professor 
of American History, University of Wisconsin. 

69. RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION (1865-1912). By Paul Leland 
Haworth. A History of the United States in our own times. 

Published by 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

19 West 44th Street New York 

Or / 



